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It’s not often that you encounter a book that can flip your entire view of the world on its side, which is why I’m taking a moment to share this incredible work by an old friend with you.

A physicist by training, Professor Richard Silberstein spent four decades as a working neuroscientist at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. He was the Chairman of the Physics Department, founder of the Brain Sciences Institute, and the inventor of a brain imaging method (Steady State Topography) that’s now used to study everything from memory to ADHD. The author of more than 110 peer-reviewed published scientific papers, he is, by temperament and profession, a scientist and skeptic.

Those credentials — he’s literally among the world’s top brain scientists — is what makes his new book, Stranger and Stranger: The Neuroscience of How Mind and Cosmos Communicate (Park Street Press, out this October) so astonishing and life-changing.

He started out trying to make sense of one well-known stubborn anomaly, precognition (seeing the future), and ended up going down the rabbit hole that his book lays out in astonishing detail.

In the first half of the book, Richard takes us on a tour of the tens of thousands of replicated, solid, usually peer-reviewed science that suggests the existence of something parapsychologists call psi. They include:

— The Ganzfeld telepathy protocol, where a meta-analysis of 108 studies published between 1987 and 2010 produced odds against chance of roughly one in ten quadrillion that such a thing could be possible, yet it keeps getting reaffirmed over and over again.
— He digs into quantum random number generators that are influenced by human thought, the double-slit experiments run by Dean Radin’s team at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and a body of presentiment studies in which people’s skin conductance rises a few seconds before a disturbing image appears on a screen, and, confounding all expectations and “rational” explanations, before the computer has even selected it.
— He revisits the CIA’s infamous remote viewing program (and its considerable and well-documented successes) and the 1995 evaluation in which statistician Jessica Utts and professional skeptic Ray Hyman, asked to assess the same data, ended up largely in agreement.

Silberstein’s own research also appears in the book and its mind-boggling. In 2024 he and a colleague published a study of identical twins placed in separate rooms, sensorily isolated from each other, as one viewed a series of random images while the other stared at a blank screen.

Changes in the “receiver” twin’s brain lined up with the moments the “sender” saw a “meaningful” picture and happened at a frequency that should have been four times in a hundred million trials. Even more fascinating, when these twins were, essentially, telepathically connected hroughout the experiment, the receiving twins reported feeling nothing at all. Whatever was going on, it was happening well below the threshold of human awareness.

It’s that observation that’s at the heart of Richard’s book’s most interesting argument, one that has massive implications for humanity, religion, politics, and science.

Silberstein proposes that our brains don’t so much “create” consciousness as connect to some vast universal source that our brains then filter. Evolution, he argues, built our nervous systems to prioritize necessities like food, sex, and survival, while it built elaborate inhibitory circuits to suppress everything else the universe is giving us access to but that our brains consider “not necessary.”

Recent studies he cites include patients with left frontal lobe damage, showing that they can affect random number generators in ways “normal” people can’t. Interestingly, when that same region of the brain is temporarily quieted by transcranial magnetic stimulation, normies can also influence random number generators.

Turn off the brain’s “gatekeeper,” in other words, and you let both creativity and the intelligence and experience of the universe, psi, leak through.

And then the book gets even stranger, as the title promises.

Silberstein shares the details of Michael Levin’s work at Tufts showing that bioelectric fields, not just genes, direct how animal (and, presumably, plant) bodies develop, including the now-famous tadpole grown with a working eye on its flank because of bioelectric stimulation.

He tells the stories of the heart transplant recipients who reported acquiring their donors’ tastes, from food to motorcycles.

He engages seriously, and with genuine intellectual courage, with Ian Stevenson’s decades of case files on children who describe past lives in detail.

And he posits that probable futures exists in a nested hierarchy of what he calls Temporal Causal Levels, shaped by consciousness itself through what he terms retrocausal loops.

While the science is amazing, the possible implications for society and politics are equally astonishing. Studies done by hardcore scientists working under the umbrella of the Global Consciousness Project found that when a certain threshold of people in a community regularly meditate, the crime rate and rate of general violence drops.

But what about the opposite? What happens when billionaires like Musk and Zuckerberg use their social media platform algorighms to feed hate, bigotry, fear, and rage directly into people’s minds? Whether they’re doing it to “increase engagement” to crank up time-spent-scrolling and advertisement exposure to make more billions, or to influence politics and political perspectives, the result could well be the same.

He argues that these billionaires have built a global machine for generating exactly the kind of massed, focused, hostile intent that his science finds actually affects the physical world around us as well as the minds of those around us.

Citing Peter Turchin’s work on Cleodynamics that charts cycles of political disintegration, Richard closes his book by calling for coordinated, large-scale group meditations focused on making a better and more peaceful world for us all.

This book will both astonish you and change how you view much of what we’re confronting today, from our psychology to our religion to our politics. Don’t miss it!

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Part One/Week One. The Book That Launched a Movement (Chapters 1 through 7)

When Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward came out in 1888, nobody expected much of it. Bellamy was a mild, sickly newspaperman from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, and he’d written an utopian romance about a Bostonian who sleeps for a century. But Jules Verne had been writing futuristic fiction for most of the 19th century, and the public more than warmed up to Bellamy’s book.

Within a decade after its first publication (it’s still in print) it had sold nearly a million copies in the United States and England, been translated into German, French, Russian, Italian, Arabic, and Bulgarian among other languages, and become the third best-selling American book of the entire nineteenth century, trailing only Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur.

It also inspired the modern progressive movement: more than 160 “Nationalist Clubs” sprang up across the country to turn the book’s vision of a possible American future into political reality. Its ideas inspired the Populist Party platform of 1892, energized the early Socialist Party, and were foundational to the Progressive Era’s fights over public ownership of utilities and railroads, and eventually FDR’s New Deal.

Bernie Sanders’ hero Eugene Debs, socialist leader Norman Thomas, and a generation of reformers said publicly that this was the book that first opened their eyes to the possibility of a new and progressive America. In 1935, when a panel of scholars was asked to name the most influential books published since 1885, Looking Backward came in second, behind only Marx’s Das Kapital.

This novel, my book club book for September, about what life could be in the year 2000 in America hit 1888 like a thunderclap that resonated for, literally, more than a century.

The book’s plot device is simple. Julian West is a rich young Bostonian born in 1857, living comfortably on inherited money, rendering, as he puts it, “no sort of service in return.” He’s engaged to Edith Bartlett, and the only cloud on his horizon is that the strikes of the 1880s keep delaying the construction of his new house.

West suffers from insomnia and has a Mesmerist — hypnosis was a huge fad in Europe and America during that era, as I’ve written in detail in my book Walking Your Blues Away — put him to sleep in a sealed underground chamber beneath his home.

He goes under on the night of May 30, 1887 but doesn’t wake up until September 10, 2000, in the house of Dr. Leete, a retired physician who has been digging a laboratory foundation in his garden and discovered the still-sealed vault. West had slept 113 years, three months, and eleven days.

Before any of that happens, though, Bellamy gives us the single most quoted passage in the book, West’s description of the society he left behind:

“I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents.”

The people on top, West admits, felt sympathy for the people in the harness, “especially when the vehicle came to a bad place in the road.” But it was a distant form of sympathy, and it came bundled with a “singular hallucination” that they “were not exactly like their brothers and sisters who pulled at the rope, but of finer clay.”

Anyone who’s watched one of today’s pampered billionaires explain why he deserves his wealth and power will recognize the type.

Once West accepts where (and when) he is, he asks Dr. Leete the obvious question: What happened to the labor question that had been tearing apart the 1880s with strikes and the murdering of union leaders, what he called “the Sphinx’s riddle of the nineteenth century.”

Leete’s answer about how America works in the year 2000 is the heart of the book, and it’s an extraordinary vision that goes well beyond even Marx’s imaginings. There was no revolution. The trusts and monopolies that terrified Americans in the 1880s simply kept consolidating until it became obvious to both America’s voters and politicians that industry organized on a national scale was more efficient than industry scattered among thousands of competing firms.

The only question left was who should own the monopolies:

“The epoch of trusts had ended in The Great Trust. In a word, the people of the United States concluded to assume the conduct of their own business, just as one hundred odd years before they had assumed the conduct of their own government, organizing now for industrial purposes on precisely the same grounds that they had then organized for political purposes.”

Bellamy has Leete put it even more sharply. It was finally understood:

“[T]hat no business is so essentially the public business as the industry and commerce on which the people’s livelihood depends, and that to entrust it to private persons to be managed for private profit is a folly similar in kind, though vastly greater in magnitude, to that of surrendering the functions of political government to kings and nobles.”

When West objects that this is a frightening extension of government power, Leete turns it around. Nineteenth century governments seized men by the hundreds of thousands and sent them off to die in wars, he says, and nobody called that an overreach:

“And, in heaven’s name, who are the public enemies? Are they France, England, Germany, or hunger, cold, and nakedness?”

The mechanism for this transformation of the fundamentals of our economy is what Bellamy calls the industrial army. Every citizen serves (works) from age 21 to 45, then retires. Unlike Marx’s vision, nobody is assigned a job: people choose their own work according to aptitude, and the administration equalizes the attractiveness of different trades by adjusting hours.

Miners gets short hours, pleasant work gets longer ones, and if a job is so awful nobody will volunteer even at ten minutes a day, “it would remain undone.” Leete adds a line that could come from any progressive politician today:

“The nation does not maim and slaughter its workmen by thousands, as did the private capitalists and corporations of your day.”

That’s where the first quarter of the book leaves us, with West still asking

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Thom Hartmann talked about his book, Who Killed the American Dream, as well as Unequal Protection, which inspired it.

We welcomed a wide range of members to the live chat, and several asked Thom questions over the hour. Thank you to all who joined Thom and moderator Nigel today.

The full hour is available to you, whether or not you are a subscriber, as this is the first live session.

September Book of the Month

Looking Backward is available as a free download from Project Gutenberg.

Each Sunday in September, Thom will post a summary of parts of the book, and paid subscribers can comment on their thoughts.

To be able to comment on posts during the month, you’ll need to be a paid subscriber to the Hartmann Report.

Join the Book Club Today!

On the last Sunday of the month, September 27, we will hold a live session on Substack, where you can ask Thom your questions and chat with other book club members. The live session starts at Noon ET / 9 am PT.

Just Want the Book Club and Nothing Else?

Visit this link: https://hartmannreport.com/account and set your preferences to the sections you would like to receive by email. You will need to be signed in.

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In a few hours we’ll meet here on Hartmann Report to discuss this book; next month there will be a new book, Looking Forward by Edward Bellamy. Here’s the final part of the last chapter of Who Stole the American Dream? The Greatest Crime Ever Told.

Two Possible Futures

The two possible futures we face today aren’t just about democracy or corporate power in the abstract. They represent starkly different visions of America: will we become more like FDR’s ideal, or will we continue down today’s road to oligarchic neo-feudalism like Russia and Hungary did?

Future One: Oligarchy Triumphant

In this possible future, the America of We the People fails. The billionaire oligarchs complete their capture of what’s left of our democracy, corporate constitutional rights remain the law of the land, and wealth concentration accelerates until a handful of trillionaires own most of our politicians as well as everything else worth owning.

The middle class shrinks down to around 10 or 20 percent of us as the American economy comes to resemble the Victorian England that Charles Dickens wrote about in almost every one of his many books. Most Americans become permanent renters, never owning homes, never building wealth, and never achieving anything close to financial security. We work multiple jobs for oligarchs and corporations that face no democratic accountability, under conditions that grow steadily worse, for wages and benefits that somehow never keep pace with costs.

Healthcare remains unaffordable, education is financed by debt, and housing fully becomes a speculative playground for private equity and foreign investors. Climate change accelerates as fossil fuel corporations use their constitutional rights to block every attempt at regulation or the construction of alternative energy systems.

Democracy becomes nothing more than theater, like in most of the other oligarchies and tyrannies across the planet. Elections are held, but oligarchs fund all of the viable candidates and use their media and “free speech” to destroy any politicians who dare try challenge the system. The illusion of choice masks total corporate and billionaire control of our society and our governments, while the Constitution is twisted by a corrupt Supreme Court into a vestigial document that only protects their patrons and allies.

If this current trend continues and those of us who remember America before Reagan’s corporate constitutional rights Revolution die out, the American Dream becomes a mere historical curiosity, a quaint, idealized past that young people skeptically read about in history books, a brief shining—but improbable—moment between the old aristocracies of Europe and the new oligarchies of the twenty-first century.

You could call it a new form of feudalism decorated with smartphones and compliant media, and it’s where we’re headed if we do nothing.

Future Two: Democracy Restored

In this future, democracy and the middle class win. The movement to end corporate constitutional rights reaches its tipping point and the Twenty-Eighth (or Twenty-Ninth) Amendment passes, explicitly stating that constitutional rights belong only to human beings.

With corporate constitutional rights stripped away, democracy can function again without corrupt Republican justices on the Supreme Court constantly constraining it. Congress is once again free to pass laws regulating corporate behavior without confronting endless constitutional litigation. States again revoke the charters of corporations that harm the public interest, corrupt executives once again go to prison, and local communities can again care for their people with revenues from taxing the morbidly rich.

Unions will recover and rebuild America as workers regain their bargaining power and union busting is outlawed. Wages rise to match productivity and the cost of living. And the fifty-plus trillion dollars that was stolen by the Reagan Revolution begins flowing back toward the working families whose labor created it in the first place.

Healthcare becomes a right like in every other advanced democracy in the world and ceases to be just another corporate profit center. Higher education becomes affordable again, and our public schools are rebuilt like Eisenhower did back in the day. Housing becomes a human need to be met, and exploiting it as a speculative commodity is outlawed or taxed into nonexistence. Climate change is addressed because fossil fuel corporations can no longer use their “free speech rights” to buy politicians and block regulation.

The American Dream is, in other words, reborn. Not the old dream of the 1950s, with its racial and gender exclusions and limitations, but a new dream for a new century. A dream where hard work is consistently rewarded, where every family can afford a home regardless of where or to whom they were born, where sickness doesn’t bankrupt people, where education opens doors instead of creating debt prisons, and where each generation once again does better than the last.

This is the America we could bring about, and it all begins by exposing Davis’s toxic headnote and using the public outrage to end corporate constitutional rights.

The Story They Could Tell

The newspapers and editorialists of the 2030s could write that in the 2020s people began to wake up.

They could chronicle how researchers dug through dusty law libraries and found the evidence of Davis’s and Field’s crime, revealed that the infamous headnote was a fraud and the oft-quoted Santa Clara decision never said what everyone thought it said. They could explain how, for 140 years, American democracy had been undermined by a lie, and the American Dream had been stolen by corporate oligarchs.

Activists organized. The Move to Amend Movement spread from community to community, educating millions. Towns such as Spokane, Lafayette, and hundreds of others passed ordinances rejecting corporate constitutional rights. States passed resolutions calling for a constitutional amendment.

The stories would document how the oligarchs fought back with everything they had, spending billions on propaganda while purchasing politicians, judges, and airtime. How they used every constitutional right they’d fraudulently acquired to prevent their own disempowerment.

But the people persisted.

Town by town, state by state, year by year, we educated neighbors. We ran for office, organized, and voted. We built a movement that finally broke through.

And in 2030, after decades of organizing, we passed the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, declaring that corporations are not persons and money is not speech.

As in 1865 in the South and 1933 nationwide, a third oligarchic era ended in America, and a new democratic age was kicked off. Corporate charters were revoked for corporations that harmed the public interest, monopolies were broken up, and wealth was redistributed through a return to rational individual and corporate taxation. Workers rebuilt unions, and communities regained control of their futures.

The American Dream, they’ll write, was reborn.

It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t quick. And it certainly wasn’t easy. But it happened because ordinary people refused to accept rule by the morbidly rich—founded on the lie of corporate constitutional rights—as inevitable. Because we understood that the American Dream wasn’t some nostalgic fantasy but a real achievement that had been stolen from us and our children, and we chose, instead of going along any more, to rise up and take it back.

Or the Story, If We Fail

Historians in the 2030s could also write a different story, explaining how in the early twenty-first century the climate catastrophe accelerated, killing millions and creating caravans of climate refugees. The billionaires and tech bro oligarchs tightened their grip on our lives and our news. As a result, what was left of our democracy after Trump’s gilded presidency collapsed under the burden of corporate money and media manipulation. The American Dream became merely a bitter memory.

Some people, they’ll tell us, saw what was happening. Researchers found the evidence of the 1886 fraud, activists tried to organize resistance, and a few communities even passed ordinances. A handful of states called for a constitutional amendment to reverse Davis’s fraud.

But most Americans—struggling just to pay the rent and childcare bills—were too busy, too distracted, too exhausted, or too cynical to care. They knew the system was rigged; they just didn’t believe they could change it, so they didn’t even try.

As a result, the oligarchs won by default. Democracy died with a shrug, a footnote in a back section of the New York Times.

In this scenario, by 2050 America becomes a brutal, iron-fisted tyranny in fact as well as function. By 2075, even the pretense of democracy is abandoned to corrupt, strongman government based on the Russian and Hungarian system. The old US Constitution had become an anachronism, a museum piece from a bygone era when people naively believed in self-governance and dreamed of economic security for all.

The crime that started in 1886 and was kicked into high gear with the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s was never punished, the theft of constitutional rights never reversed, and the American Dream never restored.

The oligarchs won.

Climate collapse made much of the Earth uninhabitable. Billions died. Civilization fragmented. The survivors lived in a world of scarcity, surveillance, and oligarchic control. The historians of 2090, if any exist, would look back at the early twenty-first century as the last moment when change was possible, when people could have acted but failed to.

When the American Dream could have been saved but wasn’t.

Which Story Gets Told?

America’s future now depends on what you do.

Will you read this book and forget it? Or will you act?

Will you share this story? Will you join Move to Amend, Progressive Democrats of America, Public Citizen, or a similar organization dedicated to fighting corporate constitutional rights? Will you attend your local city council meetings and demand your community reject corporate constitutional rights? Will you organize your friends and neighbors? Will you vote for candidates who support the amendment? Will you run for office yourself?

Will you talk to your family about this over dinner? Will you explain it to your friends and acquaintances on social media? Will you help us make it impossible for people to plead ignorance?

Will you persist when it seems hopeless? Will you keep fighting when the oligarchs push back? Will you refuse to give up?

What you do today determines the history they’ll write tomorrow.

A Final Word

Thomas Jefferson knew this day would come. In 1816, he wrote: “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

We didn’t crush it in its birth but instead let it grow for two centuries. Now it’s crushing us.

But it’s not too late.

This bizarre, artificial aristocracy of moneyed corporations and their billionaire oligarchs can still be defeated. The morbidly rich can still be stopped, and democracy can still be reclaimed, restoring the American Dream.

The greatest legal crime in American history was committed in 1886. We’re going to solve it.

We’re going to restore the American Dream.

Join us.

Let us reclaim America’s destiny, as Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. . . . ​The reflection is awful, and in this point of view, how trifling, how ridiculous, do the little paltry cavilings of a few weak or interested men appear, when weighed against the business of a world.”

Your Invitation

The first live session for members of Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club is on Sunday.

Join Thom Hartmann in a live session on Substack and share your thoughts on his latest book, Who Killed the American Dream.

Time and Place

Day: Sunday, August 30
Time: Noon ET / 9am PT
Place: The Hartmann Report Substack and in the Substack app

How it Works

Thom Hartmann will be live to talk about the book and take your questions.

You can ask questions in the chat and, if you like, can be called into the ‘room’ where you will need your video and audio on.

To use chat or to be called into the room, you need to be a paid subscriber to the Hartmann Report.

Nigel Peacock will be your moderator.

Thom will also announce the September Book of the Month.

To join in, subscribe now

Join the Book Club

This is the first live session for the book club using Substack, so we’ll all be learning how it works. Should be fun!

See you there!

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Epilogue: What History Will Say About Us

History teaches us that oligarchies are unstable systems of government that typically either collapse from their own internal rot—as happened here in 1929 when the Republican Great Depression brought down the oligarchs of the Roaring Twenties—or get overthrown by their own people, as happened in the 1860s when the fascist system that had taken over the Old South was destroyed by the Civil War.

But when oligarchies don’t collapse or get overthrown, they morph into tyranny, and usually that happens within a single generation.

That’s what happened in Russia. It went from the chaos of the 1990s oligarchy to Putin’s authoritarian state in less than twenty years. It’s also what happened in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán took a newly liberated democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state in less than a decade. It’s also what’s happening right now in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, India, and multiple other countries around the world.

Tyranny doesn’t typically pop up all at once. It comes incrementally, moving step by inexorable step, until it hits a tipping point where it can no longer be stopped. Before that tipping point is reached, most people think the system will correct itself, that once everyone figures out what’s happening, things will go back to normal.

They’re almost always wrong.

America is now in that dangerous zone between oligarchy and tyranny. Our nation’s oligarchs have controlled our politics for a solid forty years. They own the media, have captured the courts, and bought most of Congress. The question for today is whether they’ll be satisfied with their comfortable oligarchy or whether they’ll join Donald Trump’s and the GOP’s push for America’s final transition to tyranny.

Steve Bannon told us what the goal was: “Deconstruct the administrative state.” That’s tyrant-speak for dismantling the institutions that might dare to—or have the power to—constrain oligarchic power.

As a result, we’re in a race against time, and the window for successful action is narrowing. Every year that corporate constitutional rights remain in place, America’s oligarchs tighten their grip. Every election they buy makes the next election easier to purchase. Every judge they install makes the next judge easier to intimidate or buy off.

This isn’t alarmism: it’s the historical pattern, repeated across dozens of countries and thousands of years. Oligarchies either fall or they become tyrannies; there’s no third option.

In 2036, it will be 150 years since Davis wrote that corrupt Santa Clara headnote.

What will America look like?

Will we still be the world’s richest democracy, and return to being a nation founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” and government should work first and foremost for We the People?

Or will we continue the Trump-blazed path of being a nation primarily serving a billionaire president, thirteen billionaires in his cabinet, billionaire media owners, and tech bro billionaires addicting our children to rage for their own profit?

The Dream That Was Stolen

In 1944, as millions of Americans fought fascism overseas, Franklin Roosevelt delivered one of his most important State of the Union addresses. He was too ill to travel to the Capitol building, so he spoke from the White House, his voice carried over this newfangled thing called radio into living rooms across America.

While he referenced the war effort in this speech, the man who’d rescued America from the Republican Great Depression leaned heavily on his proposal—what he called a Second Bill of Rights—to make America into what Jefferson called “a more perfect union.” Its focus was a new set of constitutional rights that would guarantee the American Dream to every citizen.

“We have come to a clear realization of the fact,” Roosevelt said, “that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

FDR’s Second Bill of Rights laid out, as mentioned earlier, the rights to a job that pays well, small businesses to be free from unfair competition by monopolies, housing for all Americans, healthcare for all, and free college.

“All of these rights spell security,” FDR said. “And after this war is won, we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.”

FDR died shortly after that speech, on April 12, 1945, but over the next thirty-five years we came close to achieving that dream.

By 1980, two-thirds of Americans lived it. We had jobs that paid enough to support a family, we could afford to buy a home in our 20s, and healthcare didn’t bankrupt us. We attended college without crushing debt, and for most of us, our retirement was secure. Ever since 1933, each generation had done better than the one before it.

Then Reagan was elected and—like Trump did with Project 2025—implemented the Heritage Foundation’s 1,093-page 1980 “Mandate for Leadership,” telling the oligarchs at the US Chamber of Commerce they should seize control of the media, the courts, America’s universities, and public opinion.

While the Mandate’s two thousand–plus recommendations didn’t specifically cite Lewis Powell’s infamous Memo or Davis’s notorious headnote, it didn’t have to: corporate constitutional rights were the obvious tool to accomplish most goals of the Foundation’s billionaire founders and funders.

Reagan, the GOP, and the biggest businesses in America used corporate First Amendment rights to buy elections and drown out the voices of ordinary citizens. They used corporate property rights to battle every regulation that protected workers, consumers, and communities. They used corporate due process rights to block accountability for corporate crimes.

They crushed the unions that gave workers bargaining power, starting with Reagan’s attack on the air traffic controllers’ PATCO. They wrote the trade deals that would ship millions of good manufacturing jobs overseas. They turned healthcare and health insurance from servants of the middle class into raw profit centers. They transformed housing from a human need into a speculative commodity and loaded young people with debt for education that used to be free.

And they transferred over fifty trillion dollars from the homes and wallets and retirement accounts of working Americans to their own money bins.

FDR’s Second Bill of Rights was never passed, but the dream it represented was real for the generations that watched and lived his expansion of democracy and an economy that increasingly worked for all.

But then Reagan and his “conservative” buddies used Davis’s corporate constitutional rights headnote to kill even a hope for FDR’s Second Bill of Rights.

See you next weekend for the last half of the Epilogue and our online conversation!

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Welcome to Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club, one of the perks of your subscription to the Hartmann Report. We’ll be meeting live on the last Sunday of every month at noon ET, 9 am PT. One book a month.

And the timing couldn’t be better.

On July 30th, a federal appeals court gave Arkansas the green light to start arresting librarians. Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin enthusiastically praised the neo-Nazi-style book-banning ruling, saying it “allows Arkansas to move forward in enforcing a law that protects children from obscene materials while increasing accountability for public-library curation decisions.”

Act 372 makes it a crime to hand a minor any “harmful item,” is punishable by up to a year in jail and a $10,000 fine, and it lets city and county rightwing politicians decide what books, newspapers, and magazines are “harmful.”

And it doesn’t name or define books, so librarians are stuck guessing what some rightwinger is going to be offended by. Caution, of course, will be the word of the day, and kids will be the ones suffering.

PEN America counted 6,870 rightwing book bans in just one single school year, 2025, across 23 states. The American Library Association identified 4,235 titles challenged by these neo-Nazis in 2025: 92% of those challenges came from hardcore rightwing pressure groups and hard-right politicians.

Under 3% of the calls to ban books came from an actual parent worried about an actual kid.

PEN’s newest report found bans on nonfiction more than doubled this year, with over 1,100 history books, biographies, and memoirs pulled off shelves. They’re not chasing Lady Chatterly’s Lover; they’re going after books that warn about what’s happening right now in this country. Books like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451.

When I was a kid in Lansing, the library was just a few miles from our house and there was also a great library in my school. While librarians were happy to make recommendations and check me out, nobody ever questioned what I took home or asked my parents to sign off.

Upper- and middle-class kids will be able to get around these bans by simply buying their own books, but rural, Black, and lower-income children will be hit hard as our libraries become more and more anodyne. Researchers went through 20 years of federal time-use data covering 236,000 Americans and found that daily reading for pleasure has dropped from 28% to 16% over just the past 20 years.

So let’s do something about it together.

Some months will be my books, and on others I’ll try to bring the author on and you’ll get to talk directly with them. Some months we’ll take on something written 50 or 150 years ago, other times brand new releases, and every book we discuss will have one thing in common: it made somebody powerful uncomfortable.

Our first book is my most recent one, Who Killed the American Dream? The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told, which came out July 7th. We’ll meet to discuss it in 2 weeks, on the morning of Sunday, August 30th.

In 1886 — contrary to what many lawyers learned in law school — the Supreme Court did not rule that corporations are people. The justices ducked the question entirely. But the Court’s reporter, a former railroad president and Very Wealthy Guy named J.C. Bancroft Davis, wrote a headnote saying they had.

That one sentence — which had no legal stature — became the foundation for American corporate power in the 1980s during the Reagan Revolution, continued straight through to Citizens United, and legalized the billions that the morbidly rich are right now showering on their toady politicians.

Get the book however you like. Your free local library probably has it or can order it, and your local independent bookstore will order it happily. Or use Powells.com, our local bookstore here in Portland, which is a real gem, unionized, and has a huge inventory (it’s literally an entire city block and 4 stories high, all filled with books!).

They’re banning books because books have been foundational to positive political change from the beginning of our republic to today. So let’s read the dangerous ones together, and discuss them in a room they can’t close.

I’ll see you in the chat. Let’s all be troublemakers together. Here’s an excerpt from:

Chapter 11: The Deflection Playbook

Culture War as a Substitute for Economic Reform

The most sophisticated deflection program that today’s oligarchs are using to conceal their corporate theft of human rights is their so-called culture war itself.

“Woke” has become their all-purpose slur. They slap it on civil rights advocacy, diversity initiatives, LGBTQ equality, labor activism, honest history, and even environmental protection.

The brilliance of this kind of “anti-woke” propaganda is that it helps politicians and the people who design their political ads create what looks like a widespread voter backlash while never having to talk about the real issues that actually affect average Americans like taxes, wages, monopolies, or healthcare.

Instead of debating whether hedge funds should be allowed to buy up single-family homes (as is happening today, driving our housing crisis), the nation is forced to fight over whether schools should have books on the shelves that talk about about diverse families or the difficulties Black people have faced throughout American history.

Attacks like these on America’s schools, libraries, and public institutions like this work well for both the oligarchs and their predatory corporations. When America’s oligarchs can convince people that schools are “indoctrinating” or “mutilating” their children, that libraries are “grooming” them, and that universities are “brainwashing” them, they succeed in delegitimize the very institutions that traditionally have taught people to question oligarchic power.

The goal of these memes and the billionaire-owned rightwing media’s constant flood of moral-outrage stories isn’t really to protect children or preserve “family values.” Instead, it’s done explicitly to prevent any sort of economic solidarity from forming through keeping people battling each other over phony issues of “cultural identity.”

“Fraud” Narratives That Justify Voter Suppression

The deflection playbook being run by America’s oligarchs even extends to our democracy itself.

When elections are framed as inherently fraudulent—when Republicans claim “illegal votes” explain every Republican loss—it gets a whole heck of a lot easier to justify restrictive voting rules that drive down turnout. Voter ID requirements disproportionately affect poor voters, while the GOP has been on a fifty-year voter roll–purging binge going back to the days of William Rehnquist’s Operation Eagle Eye that mostly targets communities of color.

Reporter Greg Palast reports that Black people are 400 percent more likely to have their ballots thrown out than white people; months before the 2000 election in Florida, Governor Jeb Bush had around ninety thousand Black people purged from that state’s voting rolls, giving room for his brother George to win the state by 537 votes.

Using data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, Palast discovered that voter suppression led to 14.1 million voters having their ballots disqualified in the 2024 election that Trump “won” by a margin of only two million votes.

Around five million voters were purged from voter rolls without credible justification in the months leading up to the election, and another two million mail-in ballots were challenged by Republican “poll monitors” and then disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g., postage due). Another roughly eight hundred thousand ballots were disqualified or rejected for other, non-credible reasons, and over 3.24 million new registrations were rejected in 2024 without credible evidence.

“Fraud” also supposedly justifies reducing polling places in urban areas and doing away with drop boxes, while also limiting early voting and vote by mail.

The actual evidence of voter fraud in America is vanishingly small, as study after study has found that fraudulent voting is extremely rare and there’s not a single election in our lifetimes that’s been flipped because of it. But evidence isn’t the point for the oligarchs. The goal is to make voting itself suspect, to thus create a pretext for rules that make it harder and harder for working-class people and minorities to participate in our democracy.

Corporations support these policies because if working-class people voted in proportion to their numbers—if they weren’t suppressed and gerrymandered and discouraged—they’d almost certainly vote for economic policies that threaten oligarchic power. As we saw in New York City in 2005, they’d vote to tax wealth, strengthen unions, regulate corporations, and rebuild the social contract.

War, the Ultimate Deflection

In 1999, when George W. Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his family hired ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz to pen the first draft of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge to Keep.

Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam War and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he’d concluded (from watching his father’s “little three-day war” with Iraq) that being a “wartime president” was the most consistently surefire way to get reelected (if you did it right) and have a two-term presidency.

Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004:

I’ll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999. . . . ​One of the things [Bush] said to me is: “One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait), and he wasted it. . . . ​If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.

The attack on 9/11 gave Bush his first chance to be seen as a commander--in-chief when our guy Osama bin Laden—who the Reagan/Bush administration had spent $3 billion building up in Afghanistan—engineered an attack on New York and DC.

The crime was planned in Germany and Florida. On 9/11 bin Laden was, according to CBS News, not even in Afghanistan: “CBS Evening News has been told that the night before the September 11 terrorists’ attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the US war on terror in Afghanistan.” When the Obama administration finally caught and killed bin Laden, he was again in Pakistan, the home base for the Taliban.

But attacking our ally Pakistan in 2001 would have been impossible for Bush, and, besides, nearby Afghanistan was an easier target, being at that time the second-poorest country in the world with an average annual per-capita income of $700 a year. Bin Laden had run al-Qaeda training camps there, unrelated to 9/11, but they made a fine excuse for Bush’s first chance to “be seen as a commander-in-chief” and get some leadership cred.

Trump reprised the strategy in 2025, becoming the first American president to bomb seven different countries in one year prior to his 2026 invasion of Venezuela and bombing of Iran. Keep them occupied with the external enemy, and they’ll fail to notice who’s draining their bank accounts and stealing their wages.

Breaking the Spell

Every element of this oligarch’s deflection playbook serves a single purpose: preventing working-class solidarity.

The oligarchs know that they’re outnumbered and that if working people across racial, religious, and cultural lines ever united around their shared economic interests, oligarch power would crumble. The deflection playbook was created and is maintained to make sure that never happens.

White workers are taught to resent Black workers. Native-born workers are taught to fear immigrant workers. Rural workers are taught to despise urban workers. Christian workers are taught to distrust Muslim workers. Straight workers are taught to feel threatened by LGBTQ workers.

All of us are taught by oligarch media to blame each other for the declining American Dream, while never, ever mentioning the actual oligarchs and their corporations who actually killed it.

Corporate constitutional rights gave the oligarchs the legal weapons they needed to destroy unions, slash taxes, offshore jobs, and capture control of our government. The deflection playbook and Reagan’s ending the Fairness Doctrine gave them the necessary propaganda tools to prevent working-class people from ever launching a democratic response.

While the constitutional amendment we need to pass will strip corporations of their legal weapons, we also need to strip the oligarchs of these propaganda weapons.

That means calling out and naming these types of deflections when we see them.

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Chapter 10: The Cover-Up

How They Pinned the Crime on Scapegoats

Recently, an aficionado of Fox “News” called into my radio program to say that he was “sick and tired of being ripped off by these Somali [Black] welfare cheats.”

I asked him if he realized that from an average taxpayer’s point of view, the amount of federal tax dollars that goes to everyday safety-net programs like SNAP or basic welfare “is about $324 per taxpayer, but direct subsidies and special tax breaks that favor big businesses and industries cost each taxpayer thousands of dollars per year.”

He grunted, as if he didn’t believe me, and hung up the phone. These guys are truly well indoctrinated, which raises the question: how and why did that happen?

Reagan and the oligarchs who funded him were faced with a problem of growing discontent among “the rabble.”

The billionaires and giant corporations had largely accomplished their initial goals by the end of Reagan’s first term, and by Trump’s second, had almost completely subdued the middle class. They’d crushed unions, slashed their own taxes to almost nothing (both personal and corporate), and shipped millions of good-paying jobs overseas to low-wage countries.

They’d turned healthcare from a nonprofit public good (by law in most states) into a $5 trillion-a-year profit center, and hedge funds, big banks, and foreign investors had transformed single-family housing into a virtual casino where the house—themselves—always won. They’d successfully transferred over fifty trillion dollars from working Americans into their own money bins in fewer than forty years.

As planned, the American Dream was dying before average people’s eyes at the same time the oligarchs had become richer than any kings or emperors or pharaohs in world history. Wages stagnated while productivity—and, thus, profits—soared. Young people couldn’t afford to buy their first homes. Medical debt made a fortune for the industry but bankrupted over a half million families every year. Because of all this, the middle class had shrunk from 66 percent to 43 percent in a mere four decades.

This created the problem for oligarch-owned Republican politicians: the result of all this was that people were justifiably angry—seriously pissed off. It was the kind of anger that, throughout history, has toppled oligarchies, brought down governments, and forced the rewriting of constitutions. America had become a boiling pot, and the oligarchs were starting to feel the heat.

So, they did what oligarchs have always done from the days of the Caesars to the Confederacy: they deflected that anger.

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Not toward themselves, of course, even though they were the ones actually responsible for the theft of the American Dream. Not toward the corporations that were using ill-gotten constitutional rights to crush workers and capture control of most of our government. And not toward the billionaires whose assets exploded while everyone else’s shrank.

Instead, they deflected the working class’s anger downward, toward the very, very convenient people at the bottom of the ladder, the people with even less power than the tens of millions of struggling workers.

It was a massive cover-up of the theft of human rights, a very specific plan for blaming the victims instead of the perpetrators.

Republicans created, in other words, scapegoats.

Turning Poverty into a Moral Failure

The first move in the corporate oligarchs’ cover-up playbook was to use their political platforms and captured media to make poverty shameful and government help something that everybody should become suspicious of.

Reagan didn’t invent racism or disdain for the poor, of course, but he weaponized both with a fictional character: the “welfare queen.” In speech after speech all across the country and in TV appearances, the Gipper described a woman in Chicago who supposedly had “eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards,” and collected “over $150,000” every year in government benefits. She drove a “big” Cadillac, then a status symbol in the Black community. She was, Reagan told us, living large off us sucker average working-class taxpayers.

The story was almost entirely fabricated. But for Reagan’s purposes, it didn’t need to be true: it only needed to be useful. “Fraud” became the GOP’s favorite word for everything from suppressing the vote to cutting benefits to blaming the death of the middle class on poor and Black people.

And it was devastatingly useful. That single story, told over and over again for eight years, transformed America’s social safety net—so carefully constructed from the New Deal to the Great Society that had lifted millions out of poverty—from a source of security for struggling families into a “scam” that “cheaters” exploited. This victim blaming made poverty a character flaw rather than a product of the GOP’s new system of low wages, union busting, expensive college, unpredictable medical costs, and soaring housing prices.

The “personal responsibility” narrative followed this vilification of poor people as naturally as leaves sprouting in the spring. If poverty was a moral failure, if struggling families were in the straits they found themselves because of “bad choices,” then, Republicans and their conservative media told us, cutting programs that help them isn’t cruelty, it’s tough love. It’s actually doing them a favor by incentivizing better behavior.

I remember how Rush Limbaugh used to tell this joke (one of his favorites when he wasn’t blaming women for the economic problems of white men): “What do you do for a man when he’s down? You kick him! Otherwise, he won’t get up! Hahahaha!”

Notice what this narrative doesn’t mention: stagnant wages, union busting, exploding healthcare and education costs, skyrocketing housing prices, offshored jobs, or any of the actual causes of economic insecurity brought to us by the Reagan Revolution, powered by corporate constitutional rights based on Davis’s headnote. It instead keeps working-class anger focused on other working-class people—the ones getting “handouts”—while the oligarchs quietly pocket another trillion dollars.

It was the old story of the fat-cat corporate CEO sitting at a table with two working men, each with a plate before him. The CEO has a huge pile of cookies, and each of the two workers has a single cookie on his plate. The CEO points to one of them and says to the other, “Look out, he wants your cookie!”

The Southern Strategy and “Law and Order”

That well-known cookie meme also has a variation, where one worker is Black and the other is white. The CEO points at the Black worker and tells the white worker the Black guy wants to steal his cookie.

Reagan’s welfare queen imagery wasn’t racially neutral by a long shot. Everyone knew who Reagan was describing, just like when he’d ask people if they got angry when a “young buck” was in front of them in the supermarket line “buying steak with food stamps while all you can afford is hamburger.”

The cover-up and deflection playbook has always had a racial dimension, but after the legal and political successes of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, explicit racism became politically toxic.

So Republican strategists developed what Nixon called his Southern Strategy, which Reagan cheerfully adopted in his first speech after his nomination in 1980. It was about “states’ rights” near the scene of the Mississippi Burning murder of three civil rights workers.

It was elegant in its simplicity, a deliberate shift from explicit racism to barely coded language that activated the same resentments while maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability that could be used with great indignation in media appearances when Republicans were accused of playing the race card.

Lee Atwater, the Republican strategist who managed George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign and created the infamous Willie Horton ad, explained it with unusual candor in a 1981 interview: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N*****, n*****, n*****.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n*****’—that hurts you, backfires. So, you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

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How This Relates to Today:

In this chapter excerpt we see how the GOP, having basically nothing to offer the average American, has turned to racism and bigotry to fuel their campaigns to get and hold political power.

This strategy, making use of the reality — well known to the Republicans on the Supreme Court — that the vast majority of the morbidly rich are so self-obsessed that they’ll sacrifice our democracy for a tax cut, has been at the core of Republican campaigns since Nixon rolled out his “Law and Order” program to try to disrupt both the anti-war and Civil Rights movements.

Dan Baum chronicled how it works — and why — in 1994 when he interviewed Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, about Nixon’s “war on drugs” effort, and Ehrlichman said:

“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying?

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

”We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Here’s today’s example, posted last night to Trump’s Nazi-infested social media network. Because they’re entirely devoted to making themselves and their billionaire buddies (13 of them in Trump’s cabinet) richer and screwing working class people to do so, their entire message is: “See his brown skin? See her burka? See how different they are from us white ‘Christian’ people?”

Let’s continue the conversation next week…

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Chapter 9: The Numbers Don’t Lie

Measuring the Death of the Dream

The destruction of the American Dream isn’t just an abstraction; it’s measurable. (See Chart 9.1)

In 1980 when Reagan was elected president, at the peak of the American Dream, fully two-thirds of American families were in the middle class. A single income could support a family, buy a house, take an annual vacation, send the kids to college, and even retire with dignity.

Today, only 43 to 47 percent of Americans qualify as middle class (depending on whose numbers and what criteria you use). And it takes two full-time incomes today to achieve what a single union job gave a family in 1980.

Consider wages. If wages had kept pace with productivity since 1980, the median American individual worker’s income would be over $100,000 today. Instead, it’s around $50,000. With help from the Reagan Revolution, that missing $50,000 has largely gone into corporate profits and executive compensation: in other words, into the money bins of the nation’s oligarchs.

Then there’s housing. In 1980, the median home price was about $47,000, roughly three times the median (single-worker) household income. Today, the median home price exceeds $400,000, while median household (two-worker) income is around $75,000. That’s more than five times the household income, and in many cities it’s ten times or more. People who could have bought a home in their twenties, like Louise and I did in the 1970s, now struggle to do so even in their forties.

The same is true of education. When I attended college in the late 1960s, I paid my tuition working part-time jobs. My mom paid her way through four years at Michigan State in the 1940s working summers as a lifeguard and propping airplanes. Today’s post–Citizens United students graduate with an average of $30,000 in debt, and total American student loan debt exceeds $1.7 trillion. We’re the only developed country in the world where this is true, and an entire generation is now starting life in a financial hole that previous generations never faced.

Or consider healthcare. In 1980, healthcare costs were 8.9 percent of GDP, and most hospitals and health insurance companies were required by state law to be nonprofits. Today, healthcare costs are nearly 20 percent of GDP, and half a million American families declare bankruptcy every year just because someone got sick. Medical bankruptcy like this doesn’t exist in any other developed country in the world. Only in America.

And then there are the under-siege unions. In 1980, about a third of American workers belonged to unions, so those union contracts established the wage floor for another third of American non-union workers. Today, after forty-five years of Reaganomics’ relentless assault grounded in corporate constitutional rights, union membership has collapsed to around 10 percent. When workers can’t organize, they can’t bargain for fair wages, so corporate profits and billionaire wealth soar while workers struggle.

Perhaps most grotesque, check out wealth concentration. In 1980, the top 1 percent owned about 20 percent of all wealth. Today, they own over 35 percent. The top 0.1 percent, one in a thousand Americans, owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent of all Americans combined. Just three white men own more wealth than the entire bottom half of Americans.

This is the economic and political landscape that is today’s America, courtesy of corporate constitutional rights. The RAND Corporation calculated that between 1975 and 2018, fully $50 trillion was transferred from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent, every penny stolen from working families and transferred to the oligarchs created by these corrupt Supreme Court decisions.

That’s not capitalism or even so-called free markets. It’s naked theft, enabled by made-up corporate constitutional rights and protected by a political system that the nation’s wealthiest corporations now control.

These numbers should have sparked revolution. When two-thirds of wealth gains go to the top 1 percent, when working families can’t afford what their parents had, when the American Dream visibly dies, studies and history show that such inequality provokes mass movements that topple oligarchies.

So how did they get away with it? How did they steal fifty trillion dollars in broad daylight without facing a democratic revolt?

They had a strategy that involved deflection, scapegoating, and blaming their victims, making sure the anger went elsewhere.

The Cover-Up and Deflection Scam

As Reagan’s Revolution destroyed the union movement, transferred over $50 trillion from working-class people into the money bins of the top 1 percent, and crushed the middle class, people began to get angry.

They saw their pensions dissolved in corporate bankruptcies, their jobs sent to foreign factories, and their wages essentially frozen for more than four decades. Opportunities faded, education became absurdly expensive, healthcare started bankrupting families, and a simmering rage began to fill America.

Responding to this, the GOP and their oligarch-owned media began a multi-decade campaign to blame the collapse of the middle class first on women and Black people entering the workforce, then on immigrants, and generally on “liberals” and “socialists.”

It’s a strategy that’s worked for fascist regimes in the past: Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, and Orbán all did the same. And it was effective enough to get Trump elected twice.

But the deflection scam and the cover-up it concealed is starting to crack under the scrutiny of a new generation of young Americans. They’re figuring out what happened and how it came about, even if most don’t know the nineteenth-century backstory.

The simple reality is that the American Dream didn’t fade away: it was murdered, and corporate constitutional rights were the murder weapon.

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Chapter 8: The Crime Pays Off

Davis’s fraudulent headnote of 1886 was just the beginning. Over the next 140 years, corporate lawyers would build an empire of constitutional rights on that foundation of fraud. The progression reached its logical conclusion in 2010, when five corrupt Republican Supreme Court justices—several openly on the take from rightwing billionaires and massive corporations—handed morbidly rich oligarchs the power to buy American democracy outright.

Citizens United wasn’t just about campaign finance rules or the legalization of bribing Supreme Court justices (although it encompassed both): it was the culmination of a 140-year theft. The oligarchs finally had functionally unlimited constitutional weapons to complete what the southern plantation fascists built prior to the Civil War and the railroad barons started in 1886: the destruction of the American Dream and its replacement with an all-American form of oligarchic feudalism.

The Century of Expansion

Between 1886 and today, corporations have systematically claimed every constitutional right that was written to protect human beings.

First Amendment freedom of free speech? Corporations claimed it in the 1970s and 1980s, arguing they had the right to spend money on political campaigns, advertise tobacco to children, and lie in their marketing.

Second Amendment gun rights? Weapons manufacturing corporations claimed it to challenge state and city laws that protected citizens and schoolchildren from gun violence and to help them market their deadly wares.

Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable searches and seizures? Corporations claimed it in Dow Chemical Company v. United States (1986), arguing the EPA couldn’t use aerial photography to detect illegal cancer-causing pollution without a warrant because Dow was a “corporate person.”

Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination? Corporations claimed it to avoid disclosing evidence of crimes and to conceal the dangers of tobacco (which killed my brother), asbestos (which killed my father), and pesticides (among other things).

I still remember my dad coming home from the tool-and-die shop where he worked, smelling of machine oil, talking over dinner about the Machinists Union and how unions were the reason we had a middle-class life, his discussions with my mom about how they’d travel the world with the pension he was earning. Corporate constitutional rights took that all away from me and my family.

Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury? Corporations demanded it to drag things out and increase the costs to government whenever they were facing regulatory penalties.

Seventh Amendment right to a jury in civil cases? Corporations asserted it while simultaneously forcing consumers and employees into mandatory binding arbitration, denying humans the same right.

Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery? Private prison corporations note that the amendment still allows slavery for persons convicted of a crime, so for-profit prison slave labor has become a multibillion--dollar-a-year business that rivals the old Confederacy.

Fourteenth Amendment equal protection and due process? Corporations used these relentlessly to strike down regulations, block taxes, and prevent democratic governance.

The only amendment corporations haven’t seriously claimed is the Third (quartering soldiers in private homes), but give them time. Trump, with his increasing militarization of American cities, may still find a way to use it to make money for his billionaire buddies or install ICE agents in our houses and apartment buildings.

Virtually every constitutional right written to protect human dignity, liberty, and democracy has been converted into a weapon for corporate power.

The Destruction of the New Deal

For nearly fifty years, from 1933 to 1980, the American Dream flourished despite Davis’s corporate constitutional rights headnote. FDR’s New Deal and the regulatory framework that followed it constrained corporate power enough, in fact, to build the largest middle class in world history, the first to exceed half of the nation’s population.

The Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations were able to do this because even with corporate constitutional rights on the books, the political will still existed to regulate corporations, tax the wealthy, protect workers, and invest in public goods. The memory of the Republican Great Depression was still fresh. Thanks to FDR, unions were strong. And the courts, while accepting corporate constitutional rights, hadn’t yet extended it to its logical extremes.

That all changed with the Republican Reagan Revolution of 1981.

Reagan didn’t just cut taxes and deregulate industries: following the advice of the billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation, he activated corporate constitutional rights as weapons against FDR’s New Deal framework. His administration and partisans like John Roberts (then a lawyer in Reagan’s Justice Department) encouraged corporations to challenge regulations in court, claiming their constitutional rights were being violated. His well-funded judicial appointments put corporate-friendly judges on the bench who would expand corporate rights for decades to come.

The assault on America’s democracy and our middle class was systematic. Union busting was justified by corporate property rights. Tax cuts for the wealthy were framed as protecting corporate due process rights. Deregulation was defended as preventing unconstitutional Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment takings of corporate property. Media consolidation was enabled by corporate First Amendment “free speech” claims.

Each piece of the New Deal framework that had built the world’s first widespread middle class and the functioning democracy that supported it came under attack. And corporate constitutional rights provided the legal weapons for that attack.

When states tried to protect workers, corporations sued, claiming their contract rights were being violated. When the federal government tried to regulate pollution, corporations claimed unconstitutional Fifth Amendment takings and Fourth Amendment invasions of their privacy. When communities tried to limit corporate political spending, corporations asserted First Amendment free speech protections.

The fraudulent headnote of 1886 had been a hand grenade sitting with its pin intact for decades. Reagan and his successors pulled that pin, and the American Dream began to die so quickly that by 2015 fewer than half of Americans were still in the middle class, and it took two salaries to get there.

But pulling the pin wasn’t enough. The oligarchs needed real cover. They needed to make sure that as working families watched their security disappear, they’d blame the wrong people.

Enter the deflection playbook: “welfare queens,” “law and order,” “illegal immigrants,” “taxpayers versus takers.” It was a systematic strategy specifically designed to redirect working-class anger away from the morbidly rich and toward the powerless. As I’ll detail later in the book, the same oligarchs who destroyed the American Dream became experts at making sure nobody blamed them for it.

The Democratic Tradition of Keeping Corporations out of Politics

For roughly the first half of America’s history, states understood that corporations had no business meddling in democratic elections. In 1905, for example, Wisconsin passed a law (Section 4489a, Sec. 1, ch. 492, 1905) that explicitly said: “No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer, consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office” (emphasis added).

Make a special note of those words “any political purpose whatsoever.” Wisconsin wasn’t hedging or creating loopholes. It was unambiguously saying that corporations have no role messing around in democracy. They don’t vote, don’t marry, don’t get hungry or sick, and can live forever, so they shouldn’t be allowed to use their economic power to twist our system of governance to their benefit and to the detriment of We the People.

Wisconsin wasn’t alone in those early fights to keep states’ democracies free of corporate control; throughout the Progressive Era and beyond, states across America passed similar laws keeping corporate money out of politics. This wasn’t even controversial back then; it simply reflected common sense and a widespread distrust of the morbidly rich.

Until five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, armed with Davis’s doctrine of corporate constitutional rights, began tearing it down.

The Bellotti Decision

The march toward Citizens United really got underway in 1978 with the Supreme Court’s First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti decision.

Massachusetts had passed a law prohibiting corporations from spending money to influence ballot initiatives unless the initiative directly affected the corporation’s business, arguing that corporate treasuries were so large compared to individual citizens’ resources that allowing corporate spending would drown out human/citizens’ voices.

Basing their argument on Davis’s fraudulent headnote from the 1886 Santa Clara County decision, the First National Bank of Boston—whose CEO wanted to put some of the bank’s money into a ballot initiative to cut taxes—sued, claiming the bank’s First Amendment free speech rights to fund political campaigns were being violated by the law.

As Ciara Torres-Spelliscy noted in 2014:

In the 1970s, Santa Clara was used to justify granting corporations the First Amendment right to spend unlimited corporate funds on ballot initiatives in a case called Bellotti. The Court relied on Santa Clara’s reading when it stated that “[i]t has been settled for almost a century that corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Justice Rehnquist, in his dissent, questioned the wisdom of extending corporations political rights: “[T]hose properties, so beneficial in the economic sphere, pose -special dangers in the political sphere.” Again, Rehnquist could not convince his brethren.

In Citizens United, when the Supreme Court held that political speech is “indispensable to decision making in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation,” they cited Bellotti. Thus, it’s only a hop, skip and a jump from Santa Clara to Citizens United.

In Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, the store chain is claiming that the corporation (and not just its proprietors) has a religious objection to providing certain types of birth control for its workers as required by the Affordable Care Act. Thus, the Court is contemplating expanding corporate constitutional rights to a new logical extreme: First Amendment religious rights. It’s no surprise that Hobby Lobby’s brief relies on Bellotti and Citizens United.

The Supreme Court, in the 5–4 Bellotti decision, sided with the corporations. Justice Lewis Powell (a Nixon appointee in 1972, a year after he wrote the infamous Powell Memo), writing for the majority, held that corporate speech deserved First Amendment protection because “[t]he inherent worth of the speech in terms of its capacity for informing the public does not depend upon the identity of its source.”

In other words, it doesn’t matter whether speech comes from a human being or a corporation. Speech is speech.

This is absurd on its face: in a democracy, the identity of the speaker exercising First Amendment free speech rights matters enormously. When scientists say cigarettes cause cancer, that’s different from when a tobacco corporation says—to protect their profits—that cigarettes are safe.

When citizens go door to door to get signatures for higher taxes to fund schools, that’s different from when a corporation showers cash on politicians and judges to oppose those taxes and thus increase profits. When human beings express a political opinion, we’re exercising conscience, self-interest, and judgment. When a corporation funds a political opinion by purchasing advertising or showering cash on elected officials, however, it’s advancing the financial interests of wealthy shareholders and multimillionaire executives in ways that are often in direct opposition to the public interest.

But Lewis Powell’s majority opinion won, and thus—for the first time since FDR’s presidency—enshrined the corrupt principle that corporate “speech” (in other words, money, since corporations don’t have mouths) has First Amendment protection.

Justice Byron White dissented powerfully in Bellotti: “The State has a legitimate interest in regulating corporate participation in political debate in order to prevent corporate domination of the debate and to minimize the use of corporate economic power as a means of distorting the outcome.”

White understood what was at stake, but the Republican majority either didn’t understand or didn’t care.

Bellotti, then, opened the real floodgates that brought Reagan to power two years later and continue to wash over us with corporate cash today. If corporations had First Amendment rights to influence ballot initiatives (Bellotti), what about general elections for politicians? What about unlimited spending on electioneering? What about functionally purchasing political outcomes with the vast resources found in corporate coffers?

Those questions would be answered in 2010, with Clarence Thomas—himself the recipient of millions in “gifts” from rightwing billionaires—becoming the deciding vote.

Citizens United: The Oligarchs Strike Back

In the election year of 2008, a rightwing advocacy group called Citizens United produced a political hit piece on Hillary Clinton. They wanted to run it in theaters and as video-on-demand during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign to knock her out of the running.

The Federal Election Commission said the movie violated the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, known as McCain-Feingold, which prohibited corporations from using their general treasury funds for “electioneering communications” within ninety days of an election.

Citizens United sued, arguing their (nonprofit) corporate First Amendment right to free speech was being violated by McCain-Feingold.

The case reached the Supreme Court in 2009, and Citizens United’s lawyers first argued narrowly that their specific video should be allowed because the time restrictions were essentially arbitrary.

But the five Republican justices—Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito—saw an opportunity to do something far bigger: with this single case, they could overturn a century of campaign finance law and give corporations and their morbidly rich oligarch owners the unlimited power to spend money on—and thus influence or even control—elections.

The Republicans on the Court thus asked for re-argument on a much broader question that had never been part of the case in the first place: can the government restrict any corporate political spending at all?

As a result, on January 21, 2010, the five Republicans on the Court issued (over the loud objections of the four Democrats) one of the most consequential and destructive decisions in American history.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the five-justice majority, held that the government cannot restrict independent political expenditures by corporations. Spending money to influence elections is “speech” protected by the First Amendment, he explained, and, under the logic of Davis’s headnote, corporations have the same First Amendment rights as human beings.

The Republican justices’ reasoning rested entirely on previous cases grounded in Santa Clara and its progeny. Corporations are persons. Money is the same thing as speech for a corporation, which otherwise lacks a mouth and vocal cords. Persons have First Amendment rights. Therefore, corporations can spend unlimited money to influence elections.

Kennedy, ignoring the fact that the word corporation doesn’t appear even once in the Constitution, wrote: “The Government may not suppress political speech on the basis of the speaker’s corporate identity,” and “The First Amendment does not permit Congress to make these categorical distinctions based on the corporate identity of the speaker.”

Justice John Paul Stevens dissented in a ninety-page opinion that dismantled the majority’s reasoning piece by piece.

Stevens wrote: “Corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their ‘personhood’ often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.”

Stevens understood what the majority refused to acknowledge: corporations are not people, so granting them constitutional rights perverts democracy.

But Stevens was in the four-Democratic-appointee minority, so his dissent had no legal power. The five Republican justices—several clearly on the take themselves at the time—gave the nation’s morbidly rich oligarchs exactly what they wanted: the constitutional right to buy elections.

The Immediate Impact

The impact of Citizens United was both immediate and catastrophic for democracy and has gotten worse every year since.

In the 2010 midterm elections, the first after Citizens United, outside spending by corporations and wealthy individuals more than doubled from the previous midterm. Super PACs, which could accept unlimited corporate money, spent over $300 million. By 2012, outside spending topped $1 billion. By 2020, it exceeded $3 billion, and in 2024 was about $4.5 billion.

So now we can see who were the real “speakers” in these elections: not citizens or even voters. They were almost exclusively wealthy individuals and corporations, many hiding behind layers of anonymity through dark money groups; over 100 billionaire families put over $2.4 billion into the 2024 election alone, with the vast majority going to Trump and the GOP. Corporate PACs kicked in billions more.

Following the logic of Davis’s headnote and Lewis Powell’s memo, America’s oligarchs had been given the keys to corrupt our democracy, and they set about using them with enthusiasm.

The Logical Extension

Thus, it turns out that—predictably—Citizens United was just the beginning. Once corporations got their hands on an unlimited First Amendment right to spend money on politics, other corporate rights followed.

In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), the Supreme Court ruled that closely held corporations have religious freedom rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment. As a result, a non-living soulless corporation could refuse to provide contraception coverage to employees based on its alleged religious beliefs because it was granted religious freedom rights by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented: “In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

The five Republican justices, Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito (the same five from Citizens United), nonetheless gave corporations religious rights. When was the last time you saw a corporation kneeling at a church altar?

McCutcheon and the Continuing Assault

In 2014, in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court took this bizarre logic to its next extreme when it struck down aggregate limits on individual campaign contributions. Those same five Republican justices ruled that preventing corruption wasn’t enough of a justification to level the political playing field by reining in spending.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the First Amendment “is designed and intended to preserve a free and open public discussion of public questions,” and—because money is now a stand-in for “speech”—that contribution limits on his, Thomas’s, and Alito’s morbidly rich patrons infringed this constitutional right to buy politicians and election outcomes.

This is, to use the technical term, nuts, but it’s now the law. When Elon Musk gave a quarter-billion dollars to Trump and his campaign in 2024, it wasn’t “speech” in any meaningful sense. It was an oligarch—the richest man in the world—using his wealth to buy influence, access, and political outcomes that favored his and his companies’ bottom lines.

Justice Stephen Breyer dissented, writing: “Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard,” but he was in the minority, so the rest of us are now being drowned out in virtually every election.

The Oligarch Democracy

We now live in what some political scientists call an oligarchic democracy, a system where wealth—both individual and corporate—determines political outcomes more than votes.

The statistics are damning. According to Princeton professor Martin Gilens, who studied 1,800 policy outcomes, because of this bizarre Republican interpretation of the Fourteenth and First Amendments, “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

In other words, what ordinary Americans want has virtually no impact on what policies get enacted. What wealthy elites and corporations want, instead, almost always determines policy outcomes.

Consider all the issues that score well above 60 percent (and often above 80 percent) on national polling: gun control, free or inexpensive college, a national healthcare system, improved public schools, cheap pharmaceuticals, affordable housing, an absolute right to unionize, the right to vote without your name being purged, a meaningful top income tax rate on the rich, getting climate change under control, breaking up monopolies, and equal rights for minorities and women.

None of these things are happening, and it’s because big-money interests oppose all of them. That isn’t democracy; it’s an oppressive oligarchy pretending to be a democracy.

And it all traces back to Davis’s fraudulent 1886 headnote. Once corporations became “persons” with constitutional rights, this horrible list of outcomes became both predictable and inevitable.

The International Dimension

And these horrors inflicted on us by a series of corrupt Supreme Court decisions and the phony doctrine of corporate constitutional rights they’re based on are no longer limited to whacking democracy in our country. America’s corporate constitutional rights doctrine has also spread into international law through trade agreements drafted with the “help” of America’s largest corporations.

Starting with the Reagan administration, which first negotiated the precursors to NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), multiple bilateral investment treaties now give corporations the right to sue governments in private tribunals whenever government regulations hurt corporate profits. These “investor–state dispute settlement” provisions let corporations trample the will of We the People, and do it in secret.

For example, a Canadian mining company sued El Salvador for refusing to grant a mining permit that El Salvador documented would contaminate its drinking water. A tobacco company sued Uruguay for requiring life-saving health warnings on cigarette packages. An oil company sued Ecuador for regulations protecting its environment.

These aren’t really “trade disputes”: they’re corporations using treaty law—which they gained by financing politicians with their corporate “free speech”—to claim rights superior to democratic governance.

The same logic that gave corporations constitutional rights in America is now giving them treaty rights globally because corporate constitutional rights have gone international.

The world’s oligarchs aren’t just buying American democracy; they’re using our Supreme Court’s 5–4 Republican-only decisions to buy sovereignty itself.

The Court That Sold Democracy

The five Republican justices who decided Citizens United and Hobby Lobby—Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito—will be remembered by history as the Court that sold American democracy to the world’s most toxic and morbidly rich oligarchs.

And they didn’t even bother to do it subtly or incrementally. This power grab was done brazenly, overturning a century of precedent to give corporations and their oligarchs functionally unlimited political power.

These five justices claimed to be “originalists” who’d only interpret the Constitution “according to the Founders’ intent.” But, as history tells us, this nation’s Founders would have been horrified by the entire idea of corporate constitutional rights. They quite literally fought a revolution against corporate tyranny and then deliberately excluded corporations from any constitutional protections.

As I wrote in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, the “originalism” of the Roberts Court is a fraud, just like the headnote in Santa Clara. It’s a convenient fiction used to justify the destruction of our democracy.

History will not judge these justices kindly, nor should it. They’ll be remembered as the men who murdered American democracy at the request of the very oligarchs who paid to have them appointed.

The American Dream, Murdered

For my father’s generation, born during the Republican Great Depression and coming of age with World War II, the American Dream wasn’t just a slogan. FDR’s massive experiment with Keynesian economics worked; it was a reality for two-thirds of American families by 1980. A single income could support a family. You could buy a house for three times your annual salary. College was affordable or free. Healthcare didn’t bankrupt families. Retirement was secure. Children saw better opportunities than their parents.

As mentioned earlier, that reality was built by two Progressive Eras and a series of presidents who worked hard to constrain oligarch and corporate power. The first, from the 1890s through 1920, established the income tax, direct election of senators, women’s suffrage, and the first antitrust laws. The second, from 1933 through 1981, created Social Security, the right to organize unions, the minimum wage, and the regulatory framework that prevented corporate abuse.

But today, as we look at the wreckage of the middle class all around us, we can now see that Davis’s corporate constitutional rights headnote provided Reagan, the GOP, and their oligarch “donors” with the weapons to tear it all down.

Citizens United was the final blow against our democracy, leading us directly to the Trump presidency. Once corporations and their oligarch owners could spend unlimited money on elections, they could finance politicians who’d cut their taxes, deregulate their industries, crush their workers’ unions, and transfer wealth from working families to the oligarchs created by those same companies.

Chapter 7: What the Founders Knew

The colonists who fought the American Revolution and wrote our Constitution knew well who and what were the most dangerous enemies of democracy. It wasn’t just King George III; it was his British East India Company, the most powerful corporation in the world.

This is why the Constitution never mentions corporations and why our nation’s Founders would have been horrified by corporate constitutional rights. Instead of a nation ruled by oligarchs and their businesses, the Founders and Framers of the Constitution envisioned a nation of independent citizens, small farmers, entrepreneurs, and journeymen who owned the fruit of their labor and enjoyed a continually improving standard of living.

Although Hamilton’s vision was more industrial and Jefferson’s more agrarian, both saw a future for our nation, in their own ways, that we today call the American Dream.

The Supreme Court–created doctrine of corporate constitutional rights, however, is the opposite of our Founders’ vision. It now dominates America through economic, political, and legal mechanisms that allow a small, wealthy group of oligarchs to dominate the rest of us. Our Founders fought a revolution to stop—and, moving forward, prevent—exactly that.

The Founders’ Vision of Economic Freedom

The Founders didn’t just fight the Revolutionary War to seize political freedom from the British Crown as it says in most of the history books our kids read; they also wanted economic freedom from the East India Company. They wanted a nation where We the People made the decisions, rather than having them imposed on us by billionaire tech bros and giant corporations.

Thomas Jefferson explicitly wanted a nation of independent yeoman farmers, each owning enough land to support a family, with only a very few dependent on wages from a wealthy employer. This vision was small-d democratic to its core: citizens who owned their own means of livelihood couldn’t be controlled by employers or landlords. With the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, they could vote their consciences, speak their minds, and participate in self-governance as political equals.

Benjamin Franklin, who rose from a penniless apprentice to become one of the most successful businessmen in the colonies, embodied the promise that hard work and talent could lift anyone to prosperity, even in the early republic. His story was the original American Dream, long before that phrase even existed.

This vision of a new, free America required government to limit corporate power. If, like the East India Company, corporations could grow without limit, accumulate mind-boggling levels of wealth, and use that financial power to buy influence with politicians and thus government, they’d essentially recreate the very tyranny the Founders fought the Revolution to overthrow.

Franklin himself warned about what we today call oligarchy (aka rule by the morbidly rich). “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” he wrote. “As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

Two centuries later, Franklin Roosevelt would echo his namesake Ben Franklin’s insight when he famously declared in 1936 that “necessitous men are not free men.” Both of these two men who transformed America understood that economic security was the necessary foundation of political freedom. And they both knew corporate and oligarchic control of our economy and our politics threatened to destroy both.

The Declaration’s Missing Word

The Founders weren’t just starry-eyed believers in democracy; they were also strategic. They framed the American Revolution as a fight for “natural rights” against monarchical tyranny, using a message that played very well in Enlightenment-era Europe (particularly in pre-revolutionary France), where they needed support.

Explicitly calling out the world’s most powerful corporation in the Declaration might have complicated things, so the Founders tried to make sure corporate power would never gain the same foothold in America as it had in Britain, India, and other places across the world that were groaning under the Company’s yoke.

The Constitution’s Silence

In addition to establishing the structure of our government, our Constitution also (following Montesquieu’s advice) divides power among three branches, and limits the authority of each branch.

But even with all that, the Constitution never mentions corporations. Not even once.

This was not an oversight. The Founders knew all about corporations; after all, they’d fought one to establish this nation. Which is why they deliberately chose not to give corporations constitutional status or any sorts of protection whatsoever.

James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and others understood that corporations were useful tools for specific purposes: building a canal, establishing a bank, constructing roads and other essential infrastructure. But they were only tools to be regulated by We the People through our elected representatives, not autonomous entities with their own rights.

The Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate commerce. It gives states responsibility for chartering corporations. But it doesn’t grant corporations any rights whatsoever.

James Madison wrote to his mentor, Thomas Jefferson, on October 24, 1787 (just weeks after they’d finished writing the Constitution), about his concern for possible future corruption by “the representatives of Counties and Corporations in the Legislatures of the States much more disposed to sacrifice the aggregate interest, and even authority . . . ​over the interests of the nation.”

But, because the power to bring corporations into existence and regulate their behavior was left by the Constitution entirely to the states, he didn’t believe America would ever again have to confront a giant monopoly like the East India Company.

“Many illustrations might be given of this impossibility,” he wrote. “How long has it taken to fix, and how imperfectly is yet fixed, the legislative power of corporations, though that power is subordinate in the most compleat manner? The line of distinction between the power of regulating trade and that of drawing revenue from it, which was once considered the barrier of our liberties [by the King and the Company], was found on fair discussion, to be absolutely undefinable.”

When the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution in 1791, it explicitly protected human rights: speech, religion, assembly, due process, and trial by jury. These were what the Founders considered “natural rights” given to us by what the Declaration of Independence calls “Nature’s God” to human beings, not artificial privileges for legal fictions called corporations.

The Founders would have ridiculed—or been horrified by—the idea that a corporation, a piece of paper, a legal abstraction, could ever achieve the same rights as human beings.

Jefferson’s Warning

Thomas Jefferson never stopped worrying about corporate power. In letter after letter, he warned about the danger of “moneyed corporations” becoming a new aristocracy.

In 1816, Jefferson wrote: “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

Jefferson saw it coming, though, during the 1820s, after his presidency, as the country experienced explosive growth and the first steam-powered railroads emerged. Banks, manufacturing corporations, southern plantations, and the New York trading companies were accumulating dangerous levels of power. They were buying politicians, manipulating markets, and acting as if they were above democratic control.

Jefferson’s solution was strict regulation and charter revocation for corporations that violated the public interest. Like every other one of the Founders, he never once suggested corporations should have the constitutional rights he and his peers had put their lives on the line for; that would have seemed insane to him.

Jefferson and his peers understood something that over a century of corporate constitutional rights has caused us to forget: corporations exist solely at the pleasure of the people acting through state governments. We create them. We can constrain them. We can destroy them. They have no inherent right to exist, just the privileges that we grant them.

Madison’s Insights

James Madison, who drafted much of the Constitution, also understood the danger of concentrated economic power, particularly when it was combined with political influence.

In Federalist No. 10, Madison warned about “factions,” groups he defined as having interests “adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” He and his colleagues in the Convention of 1787 designed the Constitution’s checks and balances explicitly to prevent any single faction from dominating our government.

But Madison could barely have imagined corporations as large as modern multinationals. The biggest corporations in 1788 America were tiny compared to the British East India Company, which Madison and the others had seen as a dangerous aberration worth fighting a war against, not a model for the future of their new republic.

Madison’s design of the Constitution assumed that economic power would be relatively dispersed and that governments would control corporations, not the other way around.

Corporate constitutional rights, established in the late 1880s, however, reversed this. Instead of government controlling corporations, a corrupt Supreme Court justice and his court reporter henchman gave corporations the constitutional weapons they’d eventually use to fight virtually any semblance of government control.

The Early State Experience

The first American states took seriously their power to control corporations. In the early republic, state legislatures granted corporate charters sparingly and with extraordinarily strict conditions. Corporate charters were required to specify the purpose of the corporation, and it couldn’t do anything else. They specified how long the corporation could exist, typically twenty to thirty years (none were established in perpetuity). They defined how much capital a company could control, where it could operate, what it could own, who could serve as directors, and what reports it had to file.

Throughout the nineteenth century, state legislatures regularly revoked charters of corporations that violated their terms or acted against the public interest. The corporate death sentence was a real possibility and was frequently invoked.

In the minds of these early politicians, this wasn’t anti-business: it was a new American democracy controlling its own artificial-person creations.

Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other states revoked dozens of corporate charters in the 1800s for various offenses: failure to serve the public interest, corruption, violation of charter terms, or simply because the legislature decided the corporation was no longer needed.

Corporations were simply viewed as tools of commerce, and when a tool broke or became dangerous, you threw it away.

What Changed

Two things destroyed this system of state-level democratic corporate control.

First, after the Civil War, states began competing for the revenue that could be had from corporate charter fees, employment, and taxes on business activities. In response to a challenge to Ohio’s corporate antitrust laws by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, New Jersey pioneered “charter mongering,” offering weak regulations and low taxes to attract corporate charters. Other states followed (including Delaware, where more than half of American corporations are today chartered), and a race to the bottom began during what’s today referred to as the “Chartermongering Era.”

Second, the adoption of the Santa Clara headnote by the Supreme Court in the 1890s gave corporations constitutional rights that made state control much harder. Once corporations could claim due process, equal protection, privacy, free speech, and other constitutional rights, revoking charters became legally complex and, with the largest corporations, extraordinarily expensive.

The combination proved deadly to democracy. Weak state regulations plus corporate constitutional rights brought late nineteenth-century America corporate power and the rise of dynastic wealth, all without democratic accountability.

The Founders had designed a system to prevent exactly this outcome, but Davis’s and Field’s corporate constitutional rights destroyed it.

From the Founders to FDR

The Founders’ vision of economic freedom, of citizens owning their own labor and controlling their own destinies, didn’t die with corporate constitutional rights in the 1890s. It went underground, waiting for the right moment to reemerge.

That moment came in 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in the depths of the Republican Great Depression.

FDR understood what the Founders both knew and proclaimed: that economic security is the foundation of political freedom. “Necessitous men are not free men,” he repeatedly declared. People who are hungry, out of a job, or who can’t afford a doctor or a home, are not truly free, he said, no matter what rights the Constitution guarantees them on paper.

Roosevelt built on the Founders’ vision to create the American Dream in its modern form with a massive collection of nation-changing laws and government agencies he called The New Deal. They included the right to a job that paid a living wage, the right to organize and bargain collectively, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to access a basic social safety net that kept job losses or natural disasters from destroying families.

By 1981, that vision had become reality for two-thirds of American families. A single income could support a family, and you could buy a house for three times your annual salary. College was affordable, even with a part-time job (as I experienced). Healthcare didn’t bankrupt people, and, with Social Security and Medicare, retirement was finally secure.

Most of the Founders would have lauded this new America that FDR brought about and LBJ fine-tuned. Over loud Republican objections to the right to unionize, the minimum wage, Social Security, and pretty much every other New Deal and Great Society program, we finally became the nation of independent, economically secure citizens they’d envisioned, updated for the industrial age.

But corporate constitutional rights remained embedded in the law, a time bomb planted in 1886. Thus, when Ronald Reagan activated it in 1981, the American Dream began to die.

Recovering the Founders’ Vision

The Founders got it right: Corporations can be useful tools, but they must be controlled by democratic governance for the benefit of society as well as their wealthy owners. They’d have no inherent rights, only granted privileges. And when they abused those privileges, they’d be constrained or even destroyed.

The doctrine of corporate constitutional rights Davis and Field kicked off in 1886 turned this vision upside down, giving corporations constitutional weapons first designed exclusively for humans that they could use to fight back efforts at democratic control. It transformed them from servants of the public into our modern-day masters.

Undoing corporate constitutional rights means recovering the Founders’ vision, returning corporations to their proper place as tools of society, not rulers of society. It means restoring the economic freedom and affordability that makes political freedom possible.

It means, in short, rebuilding the American Dream.

But before we can rebuild our nation and our middle class, we first must understand how completely corporate constitutional rights have corrupted our democracy. The story of that corruption reached its climax in 2010, with the Supreme Court’s unscrupulous decision by five on-the-take Republicans on the Court in Citizens United. That decision, more than any others, shows us what happens when the fraud of 1886 is taken to its logical conclusion.

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Chapter 6: The First Corporate War

Every American schoolchild learns about the Boston Tea Party, and most also learn it was about “taxation without representation.”

That’s true, but hugely incomplete.

The Boston Tea Party was, in reality, fundamentally a rebellion against raw corporate power. The tea being dumped belonged to the British East India Company, then the world’s largest corporate monopoly. The tyranny being resisted was a new form of corporate tyranny corruptly backed by Company stockholder King George III’s government force.

The Founders of this nation, then, fought a revolution every bit as much against a corporation as against the British military. Understanding this history explains why they would’ve been horrified by the idea of corporate constitutional rights.

The Company That Ruled the World

The British East India Company was not like modern corporations: it was also, essentially, a private army with a corporate charter—a state unto itself.

It had its own military, its own courts, its own laws. It conquered nations, ruled hundreds of millions of people via its own appointed governors, and extracted wealth on a scale that dwarfed the British government itself.

By the 1770s, the Company controlled most of India, ran the opium trade into China, and dominated global commerce, including North America. It was more powerful than most governments. It could—and did—wage wars, negotiate treaties, and legally execute prisoners. It answered to stockholders, the King, and his Parliament, not average citizens or voters.

The Company’s stockholders included members of Parliament, British aristocrats, and the King himself. These conflicts of interest meant Company interests heavily shaped eighteenth-century British policy. When the Company wanted something, Parliament often gave it.

The Company was the original too-big-to-fail corporation. When it faced bankruptcy in 1773, Parliament bailed it out by granting it a monopoly on tea sales in the American colonies, thus outlawing the now-illegal importation of tea by independent merchants and traders.

That was the Tea Act of 1773, which American colonists correctly understood as corporate tyranny enforced by government power.

A Voice from the Revolution

I searched for years to find a firsthand account of what actually happened in Boston Harbor that cold December night in 1773. The participants in the Tea Party were sworn to secrecy for fifty years, by which time most were dead, so most of what they thought and felt was lost to history.

Then, in an antique bookstore in London, I found a treasure. It was sitting on a shelf with a bunch of old books from the early nineteenth century, a part of the store that smelled of dust, wax, and aging paper. When I saw it, I was astonished: I’d been looking for something like it for decades.

I immediately purchased an original copy of Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party with a Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots Who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbour in 1773, published in New York by S.S. Bliss in 1834.

The book’s author, James Hawkes, interviewed George Robert Twelve-trees Hewes, who was a shoemaker and a patriot. He knew Samuel Adams and John Hancock personally. He was present at the Boston Massacre. And on the night of December 16, 1773, he was one of the men who boarded the Company’s ships.

Hawkes’s interview of Hewes, published sixty-one years after the event, is the only actual first-person account in existence of the Boston Tea Party by a participant.

Most significantly, what Hewes described to Hawkes in this little book wasn’t just a tax revolt: it was an explicit rebellion against corporate power.

The Corporate Monopoly

Many people today think the Tea Act of 1773 simply raised taxes on tea. It did not: it was actually a massive tax cut.

The purpose of the Tea Act was to give the East India Company full and unlimited access to the American tea trade so it could sell the surplus tea it had built up in its warehouses over the previous three years during a pretty severe recession.

It exempted the Company from having to pay taxes to Britain on that tea exported to the colonies, and even gave the Company a tax refund on the millions of pounds of tea it was holding in inventory.

Because the Company no longer had to pay high taxes to England and held a monopoly on colonial tea sales, it could lower its prices to undercut local importers and the mom-and-pop tea merchants in every town in America. Additionally, it allowed the British navy to intercept tea “smugglers” to the colonies, seize their ships and cargo, and imprison their crews.

It wasn’t “taxation without representation”: it was “tax breaks for giant corporations without representation” and a government-granted monopoly.

This was what specifically infuriated the colonists. They resented their colonies being used as a profit center for a multinational corporation and their small businesses no longer being able to buy tea from “pirates” (private ships bringing tea to the colonies) because the Company had an exclusive, monopolistic right of sale in North America.

“Taxation without representation” meant something specific to that generation: hitting the average person and small business with taxes while giving the most powerful corporation in the world one of the most massive tax breaks in history. It was government sponsorship of one corporation over all competitors, plain and simple.

According to Hewes, colonists were either boycotting Company tea or buying smuggled tea to avoid supporting the Company’s profits. This resistance, he said, had “greatly diminished the importation into the colonies of this commodity.”

Meanwhile, he noted, “an immense quantity of it was accumulated in the warehouses of the East India Company in England. This company petitioned the King to suppress the duty of three pence per pound upon its introduction into America.”

The King granted the petition with the Tea Act, and the Company’s ships set sail for America with their monopoly tea.

The Alarm Goes Out

A newsletter called The Alarm circulated through the colonies. One issue, signed by the enigmatic “Rusticus,” made clear the feelings of colonial Americans about England’s largest corporation:

Are we in like Manner to be given up to the Disposal of the East India Company, who have now the Assurance, to step forth in Aid of the Minister, to execute his Plan, of enslaving America? Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men. They have levied War, excited Rebellions, dethroned lawful Princes, and sacrificed Millions for the Sake of Gain.

The Revenues of Mighty Kingdoms have centered in their Coffers. And these not being sufficient to glut their Avarice, they have, by the most unparalleled Barbarities, Extortions, and Monopolies, stripped the miserable Inhabitants of their Property, and reduced whole Provinces to Indigence and Ruin. Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but because this Company and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them at so high a Rate that the poor could not purchase them.

One and a half million people died, Rusticus wrote, in a single year, not from natural disasters but from corporate greed.

The colonists knew exactly what kind of monster they were facing. They’d seen what the East India Company did to India and were determined it wouldn’t happen to their America.

Another pamphlet, signed “Hampden,” declared: “It hath now been proved to you that the East India Company obtained the monopoly of that trade by bribery and corruption. That the power thus obtained they have prostituted to extortion, and other the most cruel and horrible purposes, the sun ever beheld.”

Philadelphia and New York Resist

The battle began in Philadelphia.

According to Hewes, “those to whom the teas of the Company were intended to be consigned, were induced by persuasion, or constrained by menaces, to promise, on no terms, to accept the proffered consignment.”

In New York, Captains Sears and McDougal, “daring and enterprising men, effected a concert of will between the smugglers, the merchants, and the sons of liberty.” The small businessmen, the entrepreneurs, and the patriots had joined forces. In many cases, like Paul Revere and Sam Adams, they were the same people.

“Pamphlets suited to the conjecture, were daily distributed,” Hewes affirmed, “and nothing was left unattempted by popular leaders, to obtain their purpose.”

The Company’s ships were turned back from Philadelphia and New York. The colonists had drawn a line.

Then the ships arrived in Boston.

The Decisive Moment

“On the twenty-eighth of November, 1773,” Hewes told Hawkes, “the ship Dartmouth with 112 chests arrived; and the next morning after, the following notice was widely circulated: ‘Friends, Brethren, Countrymen! That worst of plagues, the detested TEA, has arrived in this harbor. The hour of destruction, a manly opposition to the machinations of tyranny, stares you in the face. Every friend to his country, to himself, and to posterity, is now called upon to meet in Faneuil Hall, at nine o’clock, this day, at which time the bells will ring, to make a united and successful resistance to this last, worst, and most destructive measure of administration.’”

The colonists gathered. The Company’s local agents were urged to renounce their positions, but they refused and instead took refuge in a nearby British fortress.

A guard was placed on Griffin’s Wharf, near where the tea ships were moored. Messengers stood ready to ride to neighboring towns if the Company made any moves.

Hewes recalls the voices of the Bostonians during a hastily convened meeting in a local pub:

“Why do we wait? Soon or late we must engage in conflict with England. The opposition is formed; it is general; it remains for us to seize the occasion. The more we delay the more strength is acquired by the [British] ministers. Now is the time to prove our courage.”

A local tea seller named Rotch was asked to demand that the Governor permit the ships to return to England. The Governor refused, citing the honor of the laws and duty toward the King.

The meeting erupted. A man disguised as an Indian shouted from the gallery. The crowd dissolved in an instant and rushed to Griffin’s Wharf.

The Tea Party had begun.

That Night in the Harbor

Hewes was there. His account is vivid:

“It was now evening, and I immediately dressed myself in the costume of an Indian, equipped with a small hatchet, which I and my associates denominated the tomahawk, with which, and a club, after having painted my face and hands with coal dust in the shop of a blacksmith, I repaired to Griffin’s wharf, where the ships lay that contained the tea.

“When I first appeared in the street after being thus disguised, I fell in with many who were dressed, equipped and painted as I was, and who fell in with me and marched in order to the place of our destination.”

Between one hundred and one hundred and fifty men gathered at the wharf. They were divided into three parties, one for each ship, and Hewes was appointed boatswain of his group and sent to demand the keys to the hatches from the ship’s captain.

“I made the demand accordingly,” he said, “and the captain promptly replied, and delivered the articles; but requested me at the same time to do no damage to the ship or rigging.”

The captain of a Company ship stood by and watched as the colonists destroyed the Company’s property. He asked only that they not damage the ship itself. He knew which way the wind was blowing. Hewes continued:

“We then were ordered by our commander to open the hatches and take out all the chests of tea and throw them overboard, and we immediately proceeded to execute his orders, first cutting and splitting the chests with our tomahawks, so as thoroughly to expose them to the effects of the water. In about three hours from the time we went on board, we had thus broken and thrown overboard every tea chest to be found in the ship, while those in the other ships were disposing of the tea in the same way, at the same time. We were surrounded by British armed ships, but no attempt was made to resist us.”

Three hundred forty-two chests. Over ninety thousand pounds of tea. Enough to make twenty-four million cups. Worth over two million dollars in today’s money.

All of it destroyed to make a point about corporate power.

No Tea Shall Survive

The participants were absolutely committed that none of the East India Company’s tea would ever be consumed on American shores. Hewes describes what happened to those who tried to pocket some for themselves:

“During the time we were throwing the tea overboard, there were several attempts made by some of the citizens of Boston and its vicinity to carry off small quantities of it for their family use. To effect that object, they would watch their opportunity to snatch up a handful from the deck, where it became plentifully scattered, and put it into their pockets.

“One Captain O’Conner, whom I well knew, came on board for that purpose, and when he supposed he was not noticed, filled his pockets, and also the lining of his coat. But I had detected him and gave information to the captain of what he was doing. We were ordered to take him into custody, and just as he was stepping from the vessel, I seized him by the skirt of his coat, and in attempting to pull him back, I tore it off; but, springing forward, by a rapid effort he made his escape. He had, however, to run a gauntlet through the crowd upon the wharf; each one, as he passed, giving him a kick or a stroke.”

An old man with a large cocked hat and white wig slipped some tea into his pocket. They caught him, threw his hat and wig into the harbor along with the tea, and let him escape with “now and then a slight kick.”

The next morning, considerable quantities of tea were found floating on the water. Small boats rowed out and beat it with oars and paddles until it was thoroughly destroyed.

“We then quietly retired to our several places of residence,” Hewes concludes, “without having any conversation with each other, or taking any measures to discover who were our associates. . . . ​There appeared to be an understanding that each individual should volunteer his services, keep his own secret, and risk the consequence for himself. No disorder took place during that transaction, and it was observed at that time that the stillest night ensued that Boston had enjoyed for many months.”

The War Begins

The British Parliament responded immediately.

The Boston Port Act closed the port of Boston until the citizens reimbursed the East India Company for the tea they’d destroyed.

The colonists refused.

A year and a half later, on April 19, 1775, the colonists would again defy the Company and Great Britain, this time taking on British troops in armed conflict at Lexington and Concord, the “shots heard ’round the world.”

That war, triggered by a transnational corporation and its government’s patrons trying to deny American colonists a fair and competitive marketplace, would last until 1783.

The Declaration of Independence, written in 1776, lists the colonies’ grievances against King George III and specifically mentions taxes, troops, judges, and governors.

It never mentions the East India Company by name, but it didn’t have to. Everyone understood. The King’s tyranny and the Company’s tyranny were the same tyranny. The Company had bought the government, so fighting the King meant fighting corporate power.

The Lesson the Founders Learned

The men who wrote the Constitution had fought a corporation. They’d seen what unchecked corporate power could do. They’d watched the East India Company starve millions in India, corrupt Parliament, and try to monopolize American commerce.

And they were determined it would never happen here again.

The US Constitution contains about 4,400 words. It establishes the structure of government, enumerates powers, and limits authority.

But it never mentions corporations. Not once.

This was not an oversight. The Founders knew about corporations. They had fought one. They deliberately chose not to give corporations constitutional status or protection.

Corporations were creatures of state law, to be kept on a short leash by state legislatures close to the people. They could be chartered, regulated, and dissolved by the states and, at our country’s founding, had no rights whatsoever under the federal Constitution.

The American antipathy toward the East India Company continued even after the Revolution. When the Company tried to resume postwar trading with America, offering clothing, silks, coffee, and spices, the Americans refused. The trade war continued to and through the War of 1812.

The Founders had not forgotten. And they made sure corporate power would never gain the same foothold in America that it had held in the colonies.

Or so they thought.

A century later, a court reporter and a corrupt justice would undo much of their work with a few strokes of a pen.

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Chapter 5: The Seventy-Year Legal War

The story of the battles both for and against corporate constitutional rights didn’t begin in 1886. For seventy years before the Santa Clara non-decision, corporations fought a relentless legal war to gain access to the same constitutional rights the Founders and Framers intended exclusively for humans. They lost battle after battle until, with Davis and Field, the railroad oligarchs finally found a way to win by fraud.

Once we understand this, it’s easy to see that corporate constitutional rights were never an accident or a misunderstanding: the doctrine was, instead, the result of a sustained, deliberate campaign by morbidly rich interests to acquire constitutional weapons they could use against the “mob rule” of democratic governance. The railroad and other American oligarchs tried honest arguments for seven decades, but, when that failed, they turned to fraud.

This history also shows exactly what the oligarchs were fighting against: virtually every reform that would later build—and today sustains—the American Dream and the social democracy that made it possible.

The Early Republic and Corporate Charters

Queen Elizabeth I created the first modern limited liability corporation—the British East India Company—in 1601, but by the time America was founded, corporations were still rare and tightly controlled. The Founders had fought a revolution against the British East India Company’s economic and legal tyranny, and they weren’t about to allow that kind of corporate power in their new republic.

In the early 1800s, corporations were only created by special acts of state legislatures. Each charter was a custom document specifying exactly what the corporation could do, how long it could exist, and what restrictions on its behavior applied.

A corporation chartered to build a toll bridge, for example, couldn’t just suddenly decide to buy or open a bank. A textile mill corporation couldn’t invest in railroads. Charters specified purpose, duration, capitalization, and governance. They could be revoked if the corporation “violated the public interest,” an event called “the corporate death penalty,” and frequently were dissolved this way.

That wasn’t capitalism being stifled: it was democracy controlling its own creations for the benefit of the nation and its citizens.

As Thomas Jefferson warned in 1816: “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

The Founders understood what we seem to have forgotten: corporations are not natural beings like you and me. Instead, they’re legal fictions created by government to serve public purposes. By the standards of the Declaration of Independence (“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) and the Constitution, they have no inherent rights, only privileges granted them by We the People via the state governments that chartered them.

The First Corporate Rights Claims

As corporations grew larger and more powerful in the 1830s and 1840s, they began testing the boundaries of state regulation. Could they claim constitutional protections? Could they escape state oversight?

The answer, initially, was “no” to both questions.

In The Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), the Supreme Court ruled that a corporate charter was a contract that states couldn’t just arbitrarily revoke; there had to be cause. This gave corporations “artificial personhood” capabilities and some stability, but it didn’t make them persons with constitutional rights.

Chief Justice John Marshall, writing for the Court in that case, emphasized that corporations are merely “artificial beings, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.” They possessed only those properties that their charter granted them by the state in which they were incorporated.

That early decision protected contract rights, not corporate constitutional rights.

Through the 1830s and 1840s, corporations (mostly railroads, but also banks and trading companies) brought case after case claiming they deserved the same constitutional protections as human beings. They lost consistently. Courts understood the difference between natural persons and artificial legal entities.

The Civil War Changes Everything

The Civil War transformed America’s economy. Prior to 1860, most corporations were small, local, and tightly regulated. After 1865, massive national corporations emerged in part because of federal subsidies, especially the railroads to which Lincoln had given tens of millions of acres of federal lands.

These new national railroads weren’t like earlier corporations. They operated across state lines, employed thousands, and controlled vast wealth. And they had every incentive to escape state regulation as a way of jacking up their profits.

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, gave them the opening they’d been searching for.

The Amendment’s framers never mentioned corporations. The congressional debates around it focused exclusively on protecting the recently freed slaves. Every speech, every argument, every explanation we can find on the record concerned racial equality and civil rights for Black Americans.

But the amendment used the word “person” rather than “natural person” or “citizen.” And that got the corporate lawyers’ attention.

The Fourteenth Amendment Campaign

Starting in 1868, corporations launched a systematic campaign to claim Fourteenth Amendment rights as railroad after railroad brought cases arguing that state regulation violated their rights as “persons” under the amendment.

In The Railroad Tax Cases (1872), which Stephen Field had brought to the Court from the 9th Circuit, the railroad corporations argued that “discriminatory taxation” violated their Fourteenth Amendment rights. They (and Field) lost.

In Munn v. Illinois (1877), grain warehouse companies (with Field’s agreement) argued that state regulation of their rates violated their Fourteenth Amendment rights to the sanctity of property. They also lost.

Chief Justice Morrison Waite, writing for the majority in Munn, firmly rejected corporate constitutional rights: “When private property is devoted to a public use, it is subject to public regulation.”

The Court consistently ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to protect the recently freed enslaved people, not big corporations. Regulation of corporate activity for the public good was entirely constitutional.

But the corporations kept trying. They had, after all, virtually unlimited legal budgets so they could afford to lose ninety-nine cases if they won the hundredth. And they knew that the composition of the Court changed over time and may one day become more amenable to their arguments.

What the Oligarchs Were Fighting Against

To understand why corporations fought so hard for constitutional rights, you first have to realize what they were frantically fighting against: the First Progressive Era and everything it promised to working-class people.

By the 1870s and 1880s, democratic grass-roots movements were challenging corporate power across America. States were responding with laws that would have seemed impossibly radical just a generation earlier, limiting both corporate activity and money in politics.

The income tax was being debated repeatedly during that era, and would eventually become the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, giving the federal government the ability to tax corporations as well as individuals and fund public infrastructure and benefits. (Prior to that, most federal funding came from tariffs.) Corporate lawyers fought the income tax relentlessly, arguing that it violated corporate property rights.

Direct election of senators was also being demanded back then; they used to be appointed by the states. State legislatures, however, had been notoriously corrupt, with corporate money buying Senate seats, leading to multiple bribery scandals (the most notorious was in Montana in 1899). The Seventeenth Amendment in 1913 would give that power to voters instead. Corporate interests fought it right to the bitter end, because they’d largely perfected the dark art of bribing state legislators.

Labor protections were also spreading nationwide. States were limiting working hours, requiring safety standards, and prohibiting child labor. Corporate lawyers fought every one of these laws, unsuccessfully claiming they constituted unconstitutional interference with property rights and freedom of contract.

In response to national outrage about the growing concentrations of wealth at the top of the corporate world, antitrust laws were being proposed. The Sherman Antitrust Act would pass in 1890, giving the federal government the power to break up monopolies. Corporate lawyers spent the next century trying to gut it before five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court helped them out in the twentieth century.

In short, corporations were battling virtually everything that would later build the American Dream: every protection for workers, every tax on wealth, and every regulation of corporate behavior. They opposed, in other words, pretty much any and all democratic reforms that threatened their oligarchic power.

But they needed constitutional weapons to fight back if they wanted to be able to rise above state laws and regulations; and corporate constitutional rights, turning on the Fourteenth Amendment, would give them exactly that.

Roscoe Conkling’s Conspiracy Theory

In 1882, a curious event occurred that would later fuel claims about the Fourteenth Amendment’s “true” purpose that last to this day.

Roscoe Conkling, a former US senator who’d served on the joint committee that drafted the Fourteenth Amendment, appeared as a witness on behalf of the railroads before the Supreme Court in the 1885 San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company case, another Stephen Field decision in the 9th Circuit that came before the Supreme Court with an “equal protection” argument. Conkling was now a high-priced corporate lawyer, and the railroad paid him handsomely to testify.

Conkling presented what he claimed was a “secret journal” from the joint committee’s congressional deliberations. This supposed journal, Conkling argued, proved that the committee had intentionally used the word “person” instead of “citizen” or “natural person” to specifically include corporations.

It was a lie.

No such secret journal existed. Conkling had manipulated a handful of notes from the deliberations to make it appear the committee had discussed corporate rights. But later historians found the committee’s actual debates, thoroughly documented in the public record, and those discussions focused exclusively on protecting freed slaves.

Conkling’s “conspiracy theory” brazenly further claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment’s framers had secretly intended to protect corporations but pretended it was about racial equality just to get it passed.

This was also nonsense. The framers of the amendment discussed their intentions publicly and repeatedly; there was no secret corporate protection agenda.

But Conkling’s argument gave that era’s corporate lawyers the talking point they needed. Even though the Supreme Court didn’t decide San Mateo on constitutional grounds, Conkling’s conspiracy theory persisted. Some corporate attorneys still argue it today.

The Pattern of Defeat

Through the 1870s and into the early 1880s, corporations fought and lost case after case claiming Fourteenth Amendment rights:

Munn v. Illinois (1877): Lost. States can regulate businesses affected with a public interest.

Railroad Commission Cases (1886, decided just before Santa Clara): Lost. States can regulate railroad rates.

Stone v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. (1886): Lost on the constitutional question, though they won on other grounds.

The pattern was clear. The Supreme Court justices (other than Field) weren’t buying the corporate lawyers’ constitutional rights arguments. The Fourteenth Amendment meant what its framers said it meant: protection for freed slaves, not protection for soulless corporations that were mere creations of state law.

Corporate lawyers determined they needed a different strategy, as they couldn’t win by honest argument. So, they stopped trying to win that way and went straight to the Court’s reporter, J.C. Bancroft Davis.

The Santa Clara End Run

The genius of the Santa Clara headnote strategy, if you can call fraud genius, was its indirection.

The railroad didn’t need to win on the constitutional question: they just needed to get inserted into the official record that the chief justice claimed the Court had already decided the question.

J.C. Bancroft Davis’s headnote accomplished this perfectly. Future courts would cite Santa Clara’s headnote without ever reading the actual decision. They’d rely on Davis’s summary, which fraudulently claimed the Court had ruled on corporate constitutional rights.

The seventy-year legal war for corporate rights ended not with a victory in court but a sleight of hand in the court reporter’s office.

After 1886, the record shows, corporations stopped losing Fourteenth Amendment cases because courts now cited the Santa Clara headnote as establishing that corporations were persons. The precedent was manufactured by Davis, of course, but it became precedent nonetheless the first time another decision cited it.

That first happened in 1889, in Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway Company v. Beckwith, when the Supreme Court itself cited the Santa Clara headnote in ruling for corporate constitutional rights without questioning whether the earlier case had actually decided that issue.

The lie had become the law. The seventy-year war was over. The corporations had won.

Not through honest argument. Not through democratic process. Through fraud.

The Progressive Era Fights Back

Corporate constitutional rights didn’t stop the First Progressive Era: it just made the fight a hell of a lot harder.

Between 1890 and 1920, reformers won remarkable victories despite these repeated corporate constitutional claims. The Sherman Antitrust Act passed in 1890. The income tax became constitutional through the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913. Direct election of senators came through the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. Women won the right to vote through the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

Over shrieks of outrage from corporate lawyers, states passed worker protections, food safety laws, and regulations on corporate behavior, particularly with regard to their participation in politics.

Muckraking journalists gleefully exposed corporate abuses, outraging working people. Teddy Roosevelt busted trusts (monopolies) to the delight of small businesses. Woodrow Wilson created the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission to take control of the economy away from private banks and corporations and give it both stability and credibility.

But at every step, corporate lawyers used their new constitutional rights defined in the Santa Clara headnote to fight back. They challenged the income tax as a taking of property. They challenged hundreds of labor laws as violations of freedom of contract. They challenged antitrust enforcement as interference with corporate due process rights.

Sometimes they even won. In Lochner v. New York (1905), the Supreme Court struck down a state law limiting bakers to working sixty hours per week, ruling that the law violated the “liberty of contract” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Lochner Era, as it came to be called, saw both state and federal courts successfully and repeatedly striking down progressive legislation for decades—minimum wage laws, maximum hour laws, child labor restrictions, worker safety requirements. All were challenged as violations of the corporate Fourteenth Amendment constitutional rights allegedly granted by Santa Clara, and the Court went along with the corporate lawyers in nearly every case.

The fraudulent headnote of 1886 had given corporations a weapon they would use against every democratic reform for generations, including right up to this very day.

The Seeds of the Second Progressive Era

The First Progressive Era, however, laid the groundwork for something even bigger. Despite corporate resistance, it established a set of core principles that would again flower in the 1930s with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The income tax created a mechanism to fund public goods and redistribute wealth. The direct election of senators made the federal government more accountable to voters. Antitrust laws established the principle that corporate power could be constrained by government. And labor protections, though often struck down by courts (including to this day), established the principle that workers had at least some rights.

When the Republican Great Depression hit in 1929 and FDR was elected to solve the problem in 1932, these foundations were ready. Franklin Roosevelt built on them to create the New Deal, launching a Second Progressive Era that would finally make the American Dream real for a majority of Americans, at least until Reagan and the GOP took a meat axe to it.

But corporate constitutional rights remained, as the fraudulent pre-cedent of Santa Clara was never overturned or, frankly, even carefully examined. It sat in constitutional law like a dormant virus, waiting for the right conditions to reactivate.

Those conditions came in 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office and began the systematic dismantling of almost everything the Progressive Eras had built.

To clearly see how we got from 1886 to today, we first must know what the Founders actually believed about corporations. Their vision, it turns out, was the polar opposite of corporate constitutional rights. And recovering that vision is essential to undoing Davis’s and Field’s crime.

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Chapter 4 The Mastermind: Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field

If J.C. Bancroft Davis was the triggerman, then Justice -Stephen Johnson Field was the mastermind behind the corporate theft of constitutional rights. He’d spent three decades on the Supreme Court, building the intellectual infrastructure that would transform corporations into constitutional persons.

We must understand Justice Field to clearly see how democracy was hijacked by the oligarchs of that era. But more than just that, understanding Field also reveals the ideology behind the hijacking. This wasn’t just a case of corruption or greed, although there was plenty of both. This was, instead, a vision of America fundamentally opposed to the Founders’ and Framers’ vision of America and explicitly at odds with the possibility of creating a thriving middle class.

Field, like the railroad oligarchs to whom he was beholden, believed that property rights always trumped human rights. He believed the wealthy deserved constitutional protection from what John Adams called “the rabble”: the democratic majorities, the “common people.” He believed that workers organizing for better wages, farmers demanding fair treatment from the railroads they needed for their survival, and states regulating corporate behavior were all forms of tyranny against the morbidly rich of his day.

His vision was thus essentially feudal: a small class of white male property owners should rule over everyone else, protected by constitutional rights that the democratic majority could never touch.

Corporate constitutional rights were the weapon he—and the oligarchs close to him—chose to make that vision real.

The Gold Rush Justice

Stephen Field arrived in California in 1849, just as gold fever swept the territory. He wasn’t, however, looking for gold in the ground. He made his considerable fortune in lawyers’ fees, land speculation, and by exploiting and supporting raw political power.

Field established himself as a lawyer in Marysville, then became the alcalde for the town, a title encompassing the combination of mayor, judge, and local potentate inherited from California’s Mexican period. He wielded power arbitrarily, frequently jailed his more outspoken critics, and almost always ruled in favor of those clients who paid him well.

When California became a state, Field joined the state legislature, then became a justice on the California Supreme Court. He was ruthless, ambitious, and utterly convinced that rich people and their corporations were the only ones that really mattered.

In 1863, President Lincoln appointed Field to the US Supreme Court. It was a political appointment, as Lincoln needed California’s support and Field’s Democratic credentials to help balance the Court (with the bonus that he wasn’t, like the Southern Democrats, a slaveholder).

Lincoln would later regret his appointment, as Field quickly became one of the most consequential justices in American history, and not in a good way.

The Ideology of Oligarchy

Field brought to the Supreme Court a fully formed ideology that would reshape American law: corporations were property, property was sacred under the Constitution, and any democratic attempts to regulate or even “excessively” tax property were simple tyranny.

This wasn’t capitalism in any way Adam Smith would have recognized. Smith, in both Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, advocated competitive markets and warned against monopolies that conspired against small competitors and the public. Field, on the other hand, pushed for corporate power and saw democratic regulation of business activity as the enemy.

Field’s ideology came from his experience in California. He’d seen and admired vigilante justice, rough-and-tumble mining camps, and the rapid accumulation of massive fortunes. As an attorney, he’d watched the railroad oligarchs build an empire, and as a judge had become invested in their success.

Most importantly, he agreed with that era’s oligarchs (who were often murdering labor leaders) that the wealthy deserved protection from the democratic majority. The “mob” couldn’t be trusted with power, particularly the power to tax or regulate the railroads. Property owners, especially corporate property owners, needed constitutional shields against populist politicians.

The Fourteenth Amendment, he hoped, would finally give Field his opportunity to repay decades of largesse from the nation’s richest men.

Field’s War Against the Emerging Middle Class

Field wasn’t just pushing corporate rights in the abstract. He was waging war against the emerging American Dream even before it could be named or fully take shape.

During Field’s time on the Court, workers were organizing into unions, demanding living wages that would allow them to support families, buy homes, and give their children opportunities they never had. Farmers were forming cooperatives to escape the stranglehold of railroad monopolies. Small businesses were fighting against corporate consolidation that threatened to crush them.

States responded positively to these deeply popular movements by passing laws limiting working hours, requiring safe working conditions, preventing monopolistic practices, and taxing corporate wealth to fund public schools and infrastructure.

Every one of those laws threatened Field’s oligarchic vision of America. Every one weakened the power of the oligarchs and gave it to democratic majorities. Every one moved America closer to what FDR would later call a nation where poor and working class “necessitous men” could become “free men.”

Field saw all of this as a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a dangerous move toward the hot new idea of Marxism that was then sweeping the world’s intelligentsia. He believed that workers demanding fair wages was simple theft from property owners. He saw states regulating corporations as an unconstitutional interference with property rights and the democratic majority asserting control over economic life as mob rule.

Corporate constitutional rights were Field’s legal weapon against the American Dream before it could fully emerge.

Rewriting Reconstruction

The Fourteenth Amendment was meant to protect freed slaves, but Field believed it could be used to a different purpose: protecting corporations from state regulation.

Starting in the 1870s, Justice Field began writing dissents in both the 9th Circuit and the Supreme Court arguing that corporations were persons under the Fourteenth Amendment. He lost those arguments repeatedly as the majority of the Court understood what the Fourteenth Amendment was actually for, and several—including Waite—even occasionally ridiculed Field as a “man obsessed.”

But Field was patient. He knew that the Supreme Court’s composition would change with time. He knew that repeating an argument often enough can make it seem reasonable. And he knew that corporate money would fund challenges to every regulation, every tax, and every democratic attempt to constrain corporate power, and he wanted that money behind him and his presidential aspirations.

Field was playing the long game, building an intellectual framework that future courts could adopt.

The Slaughterhouse Dissent

In 1873, in the Slaughterhouse Cases, Field wrote one of the most important dissents in American legal history. It was important not because it was right, but because it laid the groundwork for what would later be called corporate constitutional rights.

The case involved the state of Louisiana granting a statewide monopoly to one single slaughterhouse in New Orleans owned by one of that state’s wealthiest men. Small and independent butchers sued, claiming their Fourteenth Amendment “equal protection” rights were violated.

The majority on the Supreme Court ruled against the independent butchers by throwing out the Fourteenth Amendment argument. Justice Samuel Miller, writing for the Court, explained that the Fourteenth Amendment was “designed to assure to the colored race the enjoyment of all the civil rights that under the law are enjoyed by white persons.” It wasn’t, in other words, ever meant to revolutionize federal–state relations or create new property rights.

Field dissented furiously. He argued that the Fourteenth Amendment protected broad economic rights, including the right to pursue any lawful occupation without government interference.

This argument of Field’s was eventually adopted by the Court and became known as “substantive due process,” the idea that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects not just fair procedures, but also certain fundamental rights from government interference.

It was a radical reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. And it was exactly what corporations needed to argue for constitutional protection from regulation.

Building the Case

Through the 1870s and 1880s, Justice Field kept pushing. In dissent after dissent, opinion after opinion, he argued that corporate property rights deserved constitutional protection, that corporations were persons, and that democratic regulation was, to use his word, tyranny.

The railroad oligarchs noticed and jumped aboard, funding legal challenges designed to reach Field’s Court with a fact pattern that would fit with his worldview. They hired the best lawyers money could buy and cultivated relationships with sympathetic judges.

Field was thus their champion on the Court. He socialized with railroad executives, owned railroad stock, and traveled on private railroad cars. The conflicts of interest were obvious and enormous, but in that era were frequently overlooked.

In a later time, Field would have been forced to recuse himself from cases involving the railroads. But in the 1880s, much like with today’s Roberts Court, judicial ethics were whatever the Court’s judges said they were. Field, therefore, had no intention of recusing himself from the cases that mattered most to his ideology, his future political ambitions, and his investment portfolio.

The Santa Clara Set-Up

When the Santa Clara case reached the Supreme Court in 1886, Field saw his moment.

The case wasn’t perfect, by any means. The legal issues were technical and boring, involving fence valuations and tax procedures. But it involved the railroad, whose very well-paid lawyer Sanderson was willing to argue the Fourteenth Amendment, and it thus gave Justice Field an opportunity to finally, after all those years of effort, establish a legal basis for corporate constitutional rights that would endure for more than a century.

Field’s biggest problem, however, was that the majority of the Court didn’t agree with him. They were skeptical of his Fourteenth Amendment arguments and generally preferred to rule on narrow grounds and—unlike today’s corrupt Republican-dominated Court—generally tried to avoid constitutional questions altogether.

Field, then, couldn’t control the majority. But he could influence the Court’s official reporter.

J.C. Bancroft Davis and Stephen Field shared more than ideology. They were friends who socialized in the same circles. They both had financial interests in railroad stock. And they both believed corporations and the oligarchs who owned railroads deserved constitutional protections that went far beyond those applied to average working people.

Did Field simply come out and tell Davis to write a fraudulent headnote? While possible, the historical record doesn’t prove a direct conspiracy. But it does show how opportunity, alignment of interest, and mutual benefit all came together that day in 1886.

What we know for certain is that after Davis wrote the headnote, Field never objected. In subsequent cases, in fact, Field cited the Santa Clara headnote as proof positive his Court had established corporate constitutional rights. He’d gotten what he wanted, even if he couldn’t pull it off through the Court’s actual decision.

The Long Shadow

Field stayed on the Supreme Court until 1897, becoming the second--longest-serving justice in American history at that time. His final years on the Court were marked by senility and bitterness, but his ideology had won.

By the late 1890s, the Court was regularly citing Santa Clara as pre-cedent for corporate constitutional rights. Field’s dissents became majority opinions, and his radical reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment became settled law.

And the freed slaves for whom the Fourteenth Amendment was written? By 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” was constitutional, setting up more than a half-century of legal discrimination and apartheid.

Justice Henry Billings Brown’s opinion in that case acknowledged that the post–Civil War amendments made Black people citizens and forbade states from denying equal protection, but insisted the Fourteenth was meant to secure legal/political equality, not to abolish “distinctions based upon color” or to require “social equality.”

The Fourteenth Amendment—which was supposed to protect Black Americans from discrimination—was instead used to uphold segregation.

Meanwhile, corporations flourished under Fourteenth Amendment protection. By 1900, the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of corporations claiming Fourteenth Amendment rights in dozens of cases. The amendment meant to serve freed slaves now mainly served to free corporations from democratic control by local, state, or even agencies of the federal government.

Field’s transformation of American law was complete. The oligarchs had won, and democracy and the emerging American middle class had lost.

And it all traced back to that one fraudulent headnote in that one infamous 1886 case.

Field’s Feudal Vision Realized

Field died in 1899, two years after leaving the Court. He’d spent thirty-four years as a Supreme Court justice. He’d reshaped American constitutional law more profoundly than almost any other jurist in history.

And he’d done it in service of a feudal vision that most Americans would have rejected if they’d understood it clearly.

His vision was the opposite of the American Dream that promised that hard work would be rewarded, ordinary people could build secure lives, and children would have more opportunities than their parents. Field’s vision, instead, promised that the wealthy would stay wealthy, the powerful would stay powerful, and democratic majorities would be powerless to change anything.

For fifty years after Field’s death, his vision seemed to triumph. The Gilded Age gave way to the Roaring Twenties, another era of oligarchic excess. Corporate power again grew unchecked, and wealth again concentrated at the top. Workers were again crushed when they tried to organize, and the American Dream began to seem like a cruel joke.

Then came the Great Crash of October 1929 and the Republican Great Depression. Field’s America, the oligarchs’ America, had collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, excesses, and naked thefts.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt built a new and different America on the wreckage, where workers could organize, corporations were regulated for the public good, and the morbidly rich paid their fair share. We became, for the first time in the history of the world, a country where two-thirds of families could achieve the middle class by 1980.

But Roosevelt couldn’t undo Justice Field’s constitutional legacy empowered by court reporter Davis’s headnote. Corporate constitutional rights remained embedded in the law, a then largely dormant weapon waiting to be activated. Thus, when Ronald Reagan’s “Revolution” began in 1981, that weapon was turned against everything Roosevelt had built, and Donald Trump and the GOP are doubling down on it today.

After forty-plus years of Republican and neoliberal Democratic rule, Field’s feudal vision is ascendant again today. Three men own more wealth than the bottom half of America combined. Corporations claim constitutional rights to buy elections, block regulations, and crush workers. And the American Dream is dying.

Stephen Field would be pleased, if not giddy: this is exactly what he wanted.

But Field and Davis didn’t invent the idea of corporate constitutional rights out of nothing. Instead, they built on decades of corporate legal strategy. To understand how deeply rooted this fraud really is, we need to take a quick look at the seventy-year legal war that preceded Santa Clara.

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Chapter 3 The Triggerman: J.C. Bancroft Davis

Who was J.C. Bancroft Davis? And why would he commit such an audacious fraud?

The answer lies in his connections to the railroad oligarchs, his own ambitions within America’s elite power structure, and—most importantly—whose interests he was really serving when he wrote that fraudulent headnote.

Davis wasn’t just helping the Southern Pacific Railroad win a tax case. He was helping an entire class of oligarchs acquire a constitutional weapon they could use against democracy itself, against the Progressive Era reforms that threatened their power, against the labor movement that demanded dignity for workers, and ultimately against every democratic effort to build what would later be called the American Dream.

The Court Reporter

John Chandler Bancroft Davis was born into privilege in 1822. His father was a prominent Massachusetts politician. Young Bancroft—he went by his middle name—attended Harvard, studied law, and entered a career that would take him through journalism, diplomacy, and ultimately to the Supreme Court.

By 1883, when he became the Supreme Court’s Reporter of Decisions, Davis was sixty-one years old. He’d served as Assistant Secretary of State, negotiated treaties, argued cases before the Supreme Court, and moved comfortably in the highest circles of American power.

He was also heavily invested in railroads, and had briefly been the president of a small railroad on the east coast.

Davis owned railroad stock, had financial relationships with railroad companies, and his social circle included railroad executives and oligarchs. When he took the job as Supreme Court Reporter, he brought those connections with him.

The Reporter’s job was supposed to be purely administrative: record the decisions, write brief summaries, publish the volumes. It wasn’t supposed to involve making law.

But Davis saw an opportunity.

A Man of His Class

To understand Davis, you have to understand the world he inhabited. The 1880s were the Gilded Age, a time when a small number of oligarchs controlled vast portions of America’s wealth while most workers lived in poverty, children labored in factories, women had no rights or political power, and democratic governance was routinely corrupted by corporate money.

Davis moved in the circles of those oligarchs. He dined with them. He invested with them. He shared their worldview: that property rights were sacred, that democratic regulation was tyranny, that the wealthy deserved protection from the masses.

This wasn’t unusual for men of his class. What was unusual, though, was his position. As the Supreme Court’s official reporter, Davis had access to the official record of constitutional law. He could shape how decisions were understood, cited, and applied.

And the railroad oligarchs and their man on the Court, Stephen J. Field, needed someone in exactly that position. Whether they recruited him explicitly or whether he simply understood what was expected of a man in his station, Davis delivered.

The Mysterious Letter

In 1886, after writing his fraudulent headnote but before publication, Davis wrote to Chief Justice Morrison Waite. The letter has been preserved in Waite’s papers at the Library of Congress, and I don’t think anybody had seen it in a century before I initiated an investigation and discovered it in a dust-covered file.

Davis wrote: “I have a memorandum in the California Cases Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific R.R. Co. as follows. In opening, the Court stated that it did not wish to hear argument on the question whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to such corporations as are parties in these suits. All the Judges were of the opinion that it does.”

Davis was asking Waite to confirm that his summary was accurate, that Waite had indeed announced from the bench that corporations were persons under the Fourteenth Amendment, and that all the justices agreed.

Waite’s response, also preserved in his papers, is remarkable.

Waite wrote back: “I think your mem. in the California Railroad Tax cases expresses with sufficient accuracy what was said before the argument began. I leave it with you to determine whether anything need be said about it in the report inasmuch as we avoided meeting the constitutional question in the decision.”

And there it is. Waite confirmed that something was said before argument began, but he also noted that the Court “avoided meeting the constitutional question in the decision.”

In other words, even if Waite made some random comment before oral arguments began (and we’ll examine whether he really did in a moment), the Court’s actual decision explicitly did not rule on corporate constitutional rights other than to reject them as the basis for a decision.

Waite wrote that he left it to Davis “to determine whether anything need be said about it [the corporate constitutional rights argument] in the report.” That’s a remarkable delegation of authority. The Chief Justice was letting the court reporter decide what to include in the official record.

And Davis took that opportunity to include in his headnote the bizarre claim that the Court had ruled on corporate constitutional rights, even though the decision itself said no such thing.

What Actually Happened?

Did Waite really make that announcement before oral arguments? Did all the justices really agree that corporations were persons?

The historical evidence suggests neither occurred.

First, there’s no record of such an announcement in the official transcript of oral arguments.

Second, the decision itself contradicts it. If all the justices agreed that corporations were persons and thus entitled to the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment, why would Justice Harlan write that “it is not necessary to consider” that question? Why would the Court avoid the issue entirely?

Third, no other justices left any record whatsoever of agreeing to such a radical position. We have their papers, their letters, their other opinions, and none of them suggest they believed at that time that corporations were constitutional persons for purposes of Fourteenth Amendment protections.

And fourth, the timing is suspicious. If Waite had actually made this announcement in the context Davis was suggesting, it would have been big news. Contemporary newspaper accounts of the case don’t mention it, and legal commentators at the time didn’t note it. It only appears in Davis’s headnote, which was written months after the decision as Waite lay sick and dying from heart failure.

The most likely explanation is that Waite had said something to that effect about corporations being a kind of artificial person. As Blackstone noted a century earlier and Delmas quoted, it’s true that corporations have some constitutional rights: they need legal standing to own property, pay taxes, open bank accounts, be held responsible under the law, and so on, and that’s been recognized by the Supreme Court going all the way back to the Dartmouth v. Woodward decision in 1819.

But the artificial person that’s a corporation is an entirely different thing from the “natural persons” the Fourteenth Amendment was written to protect. So, it’s possible that Waite was simply acknowledging Dartmouth, if he did make that comment or something close to it.

Thus, either Davis manufactured the claim or he mischaracterized something Waite said. Either way, Davis put it in the official record as if corporations having rights similar to humans was now established law.

And because Davis was the official reporter, because his headnote appeared in United States Reports, because nobody had reason to doubt it, the fraud succeeded.

The Motive

This raises the inevitable questions: Why would Davis do this? What did he gain?

The answer is most likely found in the gilded world of 1880s America, where oligarchs lavishly rewarded those who best served their interests, much as Trump does today with his corporate donors when they bring him gifts and donations.

Railroad stock holdings would increase in value if railroads gained constitutional protections from taxation and regulation, and Davis owned railroad stock (he’d even briefly been president of a regional railroad). He had friends who owned railroad stock, and the headnote served their interests directly.

But there was likely more to it than just money. Men like Davis operated in what were then referred to by social scientists as “networks of mutual benefit.” Today we call it naked corruption. Back in those days, they simply called it “the way business gets done.” You helped the railroad oligarchs, they helped you—financially, politically, and even socially.

Thus, Davis didn’t need to be offered a direct bribe. He knew which side his bread was buttered on. Writing a headnote that served railroad interests cost him nothing and potentially gained him much.

It was the perfect crime: invisible, deniable, and enormously profitable for everyone except the American working class and the future generations that Reagan and the GOP would crush using Davis’s headnote.

Serving the Oligarch Class

It also turns out that Davis’s fraud served interests far beyond the Southern Pacific Railroad’s tax case. He wasn’t just helping one corporation avoid property taxes; he helped an entire oligarchic class acquire a weapon they could use against democracy for generations to come.

Consider what the oligarchs faced in 1886. The labor movement was growing. The Knights of Labor had just reached peak membership and became the largest union in world history. Strikes were spreading across industries. Workers were demanding the eight-hour day, a living wage, and safer working conditions.

States were beginning to seriously regulate corporations by setting safety standards, limiting working hours, and requiring fair treatment of workers. Farmers were organizing against railroad and processor monopolies. Reformers were demanding antitrust laws to break up corporate consolidation, and the newspapers were all over it.

The First Progressive Era was dawning, and everything the oligarchs had built through corruption, exploitation, and ruthless business practices was, in their minds, under threat.

What they needed was more than a simple court victory in one tax case: they needed a constitutional principle they could use to fight back against democratic governance itself. They wanted to be able to claim that common-sense regulations violated their constitutional rights, that taxes were unconstitutional “takings” as defined by the Fifth Amendment, and that the labor protections FDR would later codify into law infringed on their constitutional rights.

Corporate constitutional rights gave them exactly that and more.

With Davis’s fraudulent headnote established as precedent, corporations could claim Fourteenth Amendment protections, such as “due process” rights. They could claim to be the victims of “unequal protection” prohibited by that Amendment when states tried to treat them differently from human beings.

Davis handed the oligarchs a constitutional weapon that they’d use for the next 140 years to fight against every democratic effort to build and protect the American Dream.

The Accomplice

But John Chandler Bancroft Davis didn’t act alone. He had an accomplice on the Supreme Court itself: Justice Stephen J. Field.

Field was more than just sympathetic to corporate interests; he was a true believer in corporate constitutional rights. He’d been advocating for them in dissents and concurrences on behalf of the railroad oligarchs in California for years.

Justice Field and Court Reporter Davis knew each other well. They moved in the same elite social and political circles. They shared the same ideology: that property rights were sacred and democratic attempts to regulate corporations were tyrannical.

Justice Field had been waiting for the right case to establish corporate constitutional rights, and Santa Clara looked promising. But when the majority decided to rule on narrow technical grounds instead of reaching the constitutional question, Field’s opportunity slipped away.

Or did it?

Reporter Davis’s headnote accomplished what Justice Field couldn’t achieve through the Court’s decision. It established corporate constitutional rights in the official record, where future courts would cite it as precedent.

Did Justice Field encourage Davis to write the fraudulent headnote? Did they coordinate? The historical record doesn’t prove conspiracy, but it shows opportunity, motive, and benefit.

What we know for certain is that Justice Field welcomed the headnote’s impact. In later cases, he cited gleefully Santa Clara as establishing corporate constitutional rights, and he never corrected the record. He never bothered to say, “Wait, that’s not what we decided.”

The silence of accomplices often speaks loudly.

The Perfect Crime

By the time anyone might have noticed the fraud, it was too late. Less than four months after joining the Court in 1937, Justice Hugo Black issued a dissenting opinion in Connecticut General Life Insurance Company v. Johnson, writing:

I do not believe the word “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment includes corporations. . . . ​Certainly, when the Fourteenth Amendment was submitted for approval, the people were not told that the states . . . ​ratified an amendment granting new and revolutionary rights to corporations.

This amendment sought to prevent discrimination by the states against classes or races. . . . ​Yet, of the cases in this Court in which the Fourteenth Amendment was applied during the first fifty years after its adoption, less than one-half of 1 percent invoked it in protection of the Negro race, and more than 50 percent asked that its benefits be extended to corporations.

Courts subsequent to the publication of Davis’s case summary had already relied on the headnote, so the precedent was established. Unwinding it would require admitting that the Supreme Court’s official reporter had committed fraud and that generations of lawyers and judges had been fooled.

Nobody associated with the Supreme Court, and certainly nobody in corporate America, wanted to admit that.

So, the fraud has stood for a century and a half. It became law through repetition. By 1890, just four years after Santa Clara, even the Supreme Court itself was citing the headnote as if it were the decision.

The perfect crime isn’t one that’s never discovered: it’s the one where discovery of it changes nothing, where the damage is already done, and where correcting the fraud would be more embarrassing or difficult than living with it.

Davis committed the perfect crime. The railroad oligarchs benefited tremendously, as do massive corporations and their billionaire owners today, but American democracy and the working class paid the price.

The Long Shadow of the Triggerman

Court Reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis died in 1907, twenty-one years after writing the fraudulent headnote that reshaped American democracy. He never faced consequences for what he did, was never investigated, prosecuted, or even publicly questioned about it.

He probably died believing he’d done nothing wrong, or at least nothing that men of his class and position didn’t routinely do. Helping the oligarchs was simply what one did back then; it was how the system worked.

But the shadow of his fraud now stretches across more than a century:

Every time a corporation claims First Amendment rights to spend unlimited money on elections, it’s Davis’s fraud.

Every time a corporation claims due process rights to block environmental regulations, it’s Davis’s fraud.

Every time a corporation claims equal protection to avoid taxes that fund schools, roads, and public services, it’s Davis’s fraud.

Every time a corporation claims religious freedom to deny employees healthcare coverage, it’s Davis’s fraud.

Every time a corporation prevents the EPA from investigating their pollution by citing the Fourth Amendment right to privacy, it’s Davis’s fraud.

The American middle class that Reaganomics shrank from 66 percent in 1981 to 43 percent today was crushed under Davis’s fraud.

The fifty-plus trillion dollars transferred from working Americans into billionaires’ money bins since the Reagan Revolution was enabled by Davis’s fraud.

The student debt, the healthcare bankruptcies, the housing crisis, the stagnant wages, the dying American Dream: all were made possible by that single fraudulent sentence written by a court reporter serving the railroad oligarchs’ interests in 1886.

Digging one level deeper, however, we find that while Davis was the triggerman, he was also apparently working for someone else. To understand the full scope of the conspiracy, we must understand its mastermind: Justice Stephen J. Field.

FYI, I will be on C-SPAN this morning at 9:15 ET.

Chapter 2: The Courtroom Showdown

The Old Senate Chamber in Washington was warm for January, the heavy air thick with coal smoke and anticipation. On January 26, 1886, two men prepared to argue before the most powerful court in America. One represented the largest corporation on the continent. The other represented a small California county fighting to collect its taxes.

The outcome would shape American democracy for the next century and a half.

The Railroad’s Champion

S.W. Sanderson entered the chamber like a man who owned it. And in a sense, he did. The chief legal counsel for the Southern Pacific Railroad stood more than six feet tall, an aristocratic bear of a man with neatly combed gray hair and an elegantly trimmed white goatee. For more than two decades, Sanderson had made himself rich litigating for the nation’s largest railroads, defending the interests of oligarchs like Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington, and Mark Hopkins.

Sanderson was famous enough that artist Thomas Hill had included him in his painting The Last Spike, commemorating the 1869 transcontinental meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads at Promontory Summit, Utah. In that painting, Sanderson appears portentous and dignified, standing among the railroad barons who had conquered a continent. He saw himself as their equal.

That day he would ask the Supreme Court to grant his corporate clients something they had been seeking for decades: the constitutional rights of human beings.

Sanderson had argued versions of this claim before. The railroads had lost every time. In 1873, the Court had declared that the Fourteenth Amendment’s “one pervading purpose” was “the freedom of the slave race.” In 1877, the railroads brought four different cases to the Supreme Court, arguing that they deserved constitutional protection as “persons” under that same amendment. They lost all four.

But Sanderson kept coming back. The oligarchs he served had unlimited resources, unlimited patience, and unlimited ambition. They would keep filing cases until they found a way to win.

The People’s Advocate

Santa Clara County’s lawyer Delphin M. Delmas was everything Sanderson was not. Where Sanderson was large and imposing, Delmas was small and unimposing, a fastidious man known to wear a frock coat, gray-striped trousers, a wing collar, and an ascot tie. He had a substantial nose and a broad forehead only slightly covered with a wispy bit of thinning hair. He looked like a clerk, not a gladiator.

But in the courtroom, Delmas transformed. His voice thrummed with emotion. He was nationally known as the “master dramatist of America’s courtrooms,” and by 1904 would be called “the Silver-Tongued Orator of the West” when elected a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

His courtroom performances were legendary. The nation would later learn just how brilliant he was in 1908, when he successfully defended Harry K. Thaw for murder in the most sensational case of the first half of the century, later made into the 1955 movie The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, starring Ray Milland and Joan Collins. Luther Adler played Delmas.

But on this January day in 1886, Delmas was not yet famous. He was simply the young lead attorney for Santa Clara County, California, a small government entity suing the massive Southern Pacific Railroad for six years of unpaid property taxes.

While Sanderson had spent his career serving the richest men in America, Delmas had always worked on behalf of local governments and ordinary citizens. He had passionately argued, pro bono, before the California legislature for a law to protect the nation’s last remaining redwood forests. He was fiercely defensive about the rights of natural persons, of actual human beings, against the artificial creatures of law that sought to usurp their place.

For Delmas, this case was about something far larger than taxes. It was about whether corporations created by state law could claim the constitutional rights won by flesh-and-blood human beings who had fought and died for independence and then triumphed over the South’s brutal oligarchs in the Civil War.

The Stakes

The case itself was almost comically trivial. The Southern Pacific Railroad owed Santa Clara County approximately $30,000 in back taxes on property with a $30 million mortgage. That’s like having a $10,000 car and refusing to pay a $10 tax on it, then taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

One of the railroad’s defenses was even more absurd: when the state assessed the value of the railroad’s property, it had accidentally included the value of fences built by private landowners along the right-of-way. The county, not the state, should have separately assessed those fences. Therefore, the railroad argued, the tax was “unequal” compared to what they paid in other counties.

But the railroad’s lawyers had slipped something else into their arguments, something that had nothing to do with fences or tax assessments. They claimed that the railroad corporation was a “person” under the Fourteenth Amendment, entitled to the same constitutional protections as the freed slaves that amendment was written to protect.

If the Court agreed, it would transform American law. Corporations would gain the power to challenge any regulation, any tax, any democratic decision that treated them differently from human citizens. They would gain access to the Bill of Rights, to due process, to equal protection. They would become, in the eyes of the Constitution, the equals of the human beings who’d created them.

Sanderson’s Argument

Sanderson rose to address the Court. Chief Justice Morrison Waite looked down from the bench, a square-headed man with a bristly graying beard that shot out in every direction. Waite himself was a former railroad attorney who had never served as a judge before being appointed Chief Justice. He owed his position to President Grant, whose administration was so wracked with railroad bribery scandals that his own Republican Party refused to renominate him for the presidency.

“I believe,” Sanderson declared, “that the clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in relation to equal protection means the same thing as the plain and simple yet sublime words found in our Declaration of Independence: ‘all men are created equal.’ Not equal in physical or mental power, not equal in fortune or social position, but equal before the law.”

It was audacious. Sanderson was claiming that a railroad corporation, an artificial entity created by state law and owned by some of the richest oligarchs in America, deserved the same constitutional protections as freed slaves emerging from centuries of bondage. He was hijacking the language of liberation to serve the interests of concentrated wealth.

Sanderson’s fellow lawyer for the railroads, George F. Edmunds, added that the Fourteenth Amendment created a “broad and catholic provision for universal security, resting upon citizenship as it regarded political rights, and resting upon humanity as it regarded private rights.”

Humanity. The railroad lawyers were claiming their corporate clients were human.

Delmas Responds

When Delmas rose to speak, his transformation began. The small, fastidious man became something else entirely—a prophet of democratic rage: “The defendant claims that California’s taxation policy violates that portion of the Fourteenth Amendment which provides that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” Delmas began, his voice thrumming with barely controlled fury. Such an argument, he said, “if tenable, would place the organic law of California in a position ridiculous to the extreme.”

Then Delmas went on the attack:

The shield behind which the Southern Pacific Railroad attacks the Constitution and laws of California is the Fourteenth Amendment. It argues that the amendment guarantees to every person within the jurisdiction of the State the equal protection of the laws; that a corporation is a person; that, therefore, it must receive the same protection as that accorded to all other persons in like circumstances . . . ​. To my mind, the fallacy of the argument lies in the assumption that corporations are entitled to be governed by the laws that are applicable to natural persons.

Delmas reached for the ultimate authority, the book that the Founders themselves had consulted when writing the Constitution: Sir William Blackstone’s 1765 Commentaries on the Laws of England. He quoted Blackstone: “Persons are divided by the law into either natural persons or artificial. Natural persons are such as the God of nature formed us; artificial are such as are created and devised by human laws for the purposes of society and government, which are called corporations or bodies politic.”

Delmas moved from legal authority to common sense. If a corporation was truly a “person,” why could it not make out a will or get married?

“This definition suggests at once that though a corporation is a person, it is not the same kind of person as a human being, and need not, nay, in the very nature of things, cannot enjoy all the rights of such or be governed by the same laws. When the law says, ‘Any person being of sound mind and of the age of discretion may make a will,’ or ‘any person having arrived at the age of majority may marry,’ I presume the most ardent advocate of equality of protection would hardly contend that corporations must enjoy the right of testamentary disposition or of contracting matrimony.”

The Heart of the Matter

Now Delmas reached the heart of his argument. Everyone in that chamber knew the history of the Fourteenth Amendment. It had been written to protect freed slaves, to ensure that the men and women who had been held in bondage would have the same rights as their former masters. The blood of a civil war was still fresh on the ground. The memory of slavery was still alive.

He continued: “The whole history of the Fourteenth Amendment demonstrates beyond dispute that its whole scope and object was to establish equality between men, an attainable result, and not to establish equality between natural and artificial beings, an impossible result.”

Delmas was trembling now, his small frame vibrating with righteous indignation. He was a California Democrat who had spent his life fighting for the little guy, and he knew, as did anyone who read the newspapers of that era, exactly what the Fourteenth Amendment meant and why it had been written.

The Fourteenth Amendment, he declared, “is as broad as humanity itself”:

Wherever man is found within the confines of this Union, whatever his race, religion, or color, be he Caucasian, African, or Mongolian, be he Christian, infidel, or idolater, be he white, black, or copper-colored, he may take shelter under this great law as under a shield against individual oppression in any form, individual injustice in any shape. It is a protection to all men because they are men, members of the same great family, children of the same omnipotent Creator.

In its comprehensive words I find written by the hand of a nation of sixty millions in the firmament of imperishable law the sentiment uttered more than a hundred years ago by the philosopher of Geneva, and re-echoed in this country by the authors of the Declaration of the Thirteen Colonies: Proclaim to the world the equality of man.

The Mission of the Amendment

Speaking of the object of the Fourteenth Amendment, Delmas laid it out plain:

Its mission was to raise the humble, the down-trodden, and the oppressed to the level of the most exalted upon the broad plain of humanity, to make man the equal of man; but not to make the creature of the State, the bodiless, soulless, and mystic creature called a corporation, the equal of the creature of God. . . ​.

Therefore, I venture to repeat that the Fourteenth Amendment does not command equality between human beings and corporations.

The bodiless, soulless, and mystic creature called a corporation. Delmas had found the phrase that captured exactly what the railroads were asking for: to make an artificial creation of law the constitutional equal of a child of God.

The Warning

In closing, Delmas issued a warning. This case, he suggested, could be one of the most important in the history of the United States. If corporations were given the powerful cudgel of human rights secured by the Bill of Rights, their ability to amass wealth and power could lead to death, war, and the impoverishment of actual human beings on a massive scale.

“I have now done,” he said. “Yet I cannot but think that the controversy now debated before your Honors is one of no ordinary importance.”

The chamber fell silent. Delmas had laid before the Court the full stakes of what the railroad was asking. He had traced the history of the Fourteenth Amendment from the American Revolution to the blood of the Civil War to this moment, from Declaration of Independence to the liberation of enslaved human beings to the attempted liberation of soulless corporations.

The question was whether the Court would listen.

The Long Wait

A year and five months passed while the Supreme Court debated the issues in private.

In that time, the railroad oligarchs waited. Leland Stanford continued expanding his empire. Collis Huntington continued buying politicians. The Southern Pacific Railroad continued to refuse to pay its taxes, its lawyers confident that their strategy would eventually succeed.

And then came May 10, 1886.

That afternoon, in the same Old Senate Chamber where Delmas had delivered his passionate defense of human rights, Chief Justice Waite prepared to announce the Court’s decision. Delmas was there. Sanderson was there. The fate of American democracy hung in the balance.

What happened next would not become clear for another eighty years. The crime was about to be committed, and it would be hidden in plain sight for generations.

Delmas had won the argument. He would lose the war.

A Discovery Across Time

I searched for the better part of a year for copies of the arguments made in the Santa Clara case. The Supreme Court kept no detailed notes of oral arguments in those days. Most of what was said in that chamber was lost to history.

Then, in an antiquarian bookstore in San Francisco, I found a treasure: Speeches and Addresses by D.M. Delmas. It was a hardbound collection that Delmas had personally paid to self-publish in 1901, containing his most important courtroom arguments, including his full presentation before the Supreme Court in the Santa Clara case.

Holding that book was like holding a time machine. Delmas’s arguments were as brilliant and persuasive as any words that Erle Stanley Gardner ever put into the mouth of Perry Mason. Here was the voice of a man fighting for the soul of American democracy, preserved across more than a century.

He was right about everything. Corporations were artificial creations of law, not natural persons. The Fourteenth Amendment was written to protect freed slaves, not railroad barons. Granting corporations constitutional rights would distort American democracy for generations to come. It could even empower a would-be dictator to take over America with the help of corporate money.

Delmas saw it all, warned of it all, fought against it with every tool at his disposal.

And he lost anyway. Not because his arguments were wrong, but because the fix was already in. The conspiracy was already underway.

What Delmas could not know, standing in that courtroom, was that Justice Stephen J. Field was sitting on the bench with a plan. Field had already ruled repeatedly (including in the Santa Clara case) as a circuit court judge in California that corporations were persons under the Fourteenth Amendment. He owned railroad stock. He socialized with railroad executives. He harbored presidential ambitions that he hoped the oligarchs would finance.

And he had a friend in the court reporter’s office.

The Scene of the Crime

The crime took place in Washington, DC, but its seeds were planted in California, where the most powerful corporation in America was waging war against democracy itself.

The Dawn of the First Progressive Era

To truly grasp the scope of the crime of 1886, you first have to understand what America was becoming at the time, and what the oligarchs were desperately trying to stop.

The 1880s started what historians would later call the First Progressive Era. After decades of unfettered corporate power following the Civil War, leading to brutal practices against workers, Americans were finally waking up and organizing. This rise of the new power of labor and communities demanding progressive changes had that era’s oligarchs terrified.

By 1886, the Knights of Labor had grown to seven hundred thousand members, which made it the largest labor organization in American history. Workers, who’d been treated as disposable, were discovering their collective power and demanding an eight-hour workday, safer working conditions, and an actual living wage so they could support their families with dignity.

States were also beginning to regulate corporations in serious ways. These included new laws that limited working hours, required basic safety standards in factories and mines, and taxed corporate property to fund public schools, roads, mass transit, and other infrastructure that would benefit ordinary citizens beyond just the morbidly rich.

Farmers were organizing into state-based cooperatives, pooling their resources to escape the stranglehold of the railroad shipping monopolies and grain elevator cartels. The Grange movement had already won major victories in several states, confirming the newly recognized principle that state governments had the power to regulate corporations by citing the “public interest.”

In short, the seeds of the American Dream—the promise that hard work would be rewarded with security and dignity, that ordinary people could own their own homes and businesses, that children would have opportunities their parents never had—were just beginning to sprout. The Progressive Era that would transform America and create the world’s first widespread middle class was dawning.

The oligarchs and “conservative” politicians of that day well understood what was at stake. If this movement succeeded, if workers gained real power, if states could effectively regulate corporate activities, if taxes on the wealthy funded public goods that lifted all boats, then the era of rampant, unchecked corporate dominance would end. The railroad barons, the steel magnates, and the banking titans (among others) who’d accumulated unprecedented fortunes would have to share that power with America’s democratic majority.

The oligarchs thus needed a weapon to fight back. They searched for years and finally found it in the Fourteenth Amendment, written to protect freed slaves but now soon to be perverted to protect corporate profits and oligarchic wealth.

The Railroad Oligarchs

In the 1880s, the Southern Pacific Railroad wasn’t just a company: it essentially functioned as if it were a government unto itself.

The railroad controlled California’s politics completely. Its executives owned senators, judges, governors, and newspaper editors. It had its own police force, its own courts and jails, and its own laws. When the railroad wanted something, the railroad got it. When it didn’t want something, that thing didn’t happen.

The men who owned the Southern Pacific—Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker, known as the “Big Four”—were America’s first oligarchs (other than the Southern plantation owners who’d tried to overthrow democracy and were defeated in the Civil War). They weren’t just rich; they wielded their wealth as a weapon to bend local, state, and even the federal government to their collective will.

Stanford would later found Stanford University, laundering his reputation through philanthropy, the way many oligarchs have done ever since. But that came later; in the 1880s he was a railroad baron who saw democracy as an infuriating obstacle to ever-increasing profits and a challenge to his own personal wealth and political power.

And his railroad had a problem. California counties, under pressure from voters, were passing legislation that taxed railroad property to pay for public improvements including schools, roads, and bridges. The railroad barons, incensed, called this theft. They’d built their empires via federal land grants (Lincoln gave them tens of millions of acres during the Civil War), political corruption, and absolutely ruthless business practices. The idea that local communities could tax them to fund the common good seemed, to these railroad oligarchs, like an outrageous violation of their rights.

Most importantly, those taxes weren’t just about revenue; they were also about power. They were about democratic communities saying out loud that they could control the corporations that operated in their territory. They claimed that corporations existed to serve public purposes, not the other way around.

If California could tax the railroads to fund public schools, the oligarchs reasoned, then children of workers might get educated. Educated workers would know how to demand better wages. Better wages would cut into railroad profits. If these affronts were allowed to stand, the whole system that kept the oligarchs on top might start to unravel.

So, Stanford and his buddies decided to manufacture a constitutional right that didn’t exist: the right of corporations to be treated as “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment. It was a preemptive strike against the Progressive Era before it had even fully emerged.

The Amendment Written in Blood

The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, just three years after the Civil War ended. Its purpose was singular and clear: to guarantee that freed slaves would be recognized as full citizens with constitutional rights.

Section 1 contains the key language: “No State shall . . . ​ deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Over six hundred thousand Americans died in the Civil War; the Fourteenth Amendment was drafted in their blood. It was meant to ensure that the Black Americans for whom the war was fought would be protected by the Constitution. It was meant to guarantee that the promise of America—that all men are created equal, that every American deserved a chance at what Jefferson called “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—would finally apply to all Americans, regardless of the color of their skin.

The amendment carried the potential for real power, and it had already begun to transform the nature of America through Reconstruction, so the railroad oligarchs decided to exploit and corrupt it for their own purposes.

They’d tried before. During the first two decades after the Civil War following its ratification, corporations brought case after case to court, arguing that they were “persons” entitled to Fourteenth Amendment protections and thus access to the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution). They lost. Repeatedly.

For example, in 1877, in Munn v. Illinois, the Supreme Court explicitly rejected the idea that corporations had the same rights as natural persons. Chief Justice Morrison Waite wrote for the majority that corporations were subject to “regulation . . . ​for the public good.” Although they had a limited form of what today we’d call artificial personhood so they could sign contracts and pay taxes, they were not protected as if they were human persons under the Fourteenth Amendment.

That decision was a victory for democracy. It affirmed what the Founders understood: that corporations are creations of law, subject to democratic control, not autonomous entities with the same “inherent rights” recognized for humans in the Bill of Rights. It meant that each of the states could regulate businesses in its own way, tax them fairly, and require them to serve the public interest.

If Munn v. Illinois had remained the law of the land, the reforms of the Progressive Era that followed might have been easier to achieve and harder to reverse. The American Dream might have taken root even earlier, and today we’d probably be far ahead even of Europe’s most progressive democracies like Norway and Denmark, since we would have had such a huge head-start.

That failing, the oligarchs needed a new strategy.

The Tax Case

In 1882, the Southern Pacific Railroad simply stopped paying property taxes in several California counties, claiming the taxes were illegitimate. The counties sued, and the railroad fought back with an entirely new legal argument.

They claimed that those California counties’ tax assessment methods violated the Fourteenth Amendment because they treated railroad property differently from other property, and that different counties had different tax rates. This “unequal protection,” they argued, violated their rights as “persons” under the Constitution.

The case was Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. It worked its way through the lower courts for four years and finally reached the Supreme Court for the 1885/1886 term.

The railroad had advantages that most litigants lack. They had unlimited money for legal fees, political connections to judges and politicians, and, most importantly, they had something else: a friend on the Supreme Court itself.

US Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen J. Field was a Californian who’d made his fortune during the Gold Rush. He owned railroad stock, socialized with railroad oligarchs, and believed, passionately, that corporations deserved constitutional protection from democratic governance.

Field’s vision could be described as feudal. Like Edmund Burke generations earlier, he believed a small class of property owners should rule America, protected by the Constitution from the whims of the democratic majority. Wealth, he believed, was proof of goodness, wisdom, and competence, and poverty was a failure of the will.

The emerging middle class of the late mid-nineteenth century threatened this vision, in Field’s view. Workers organizing into unions, farmers forming cooperatives, small businesses openly fighting the monopolies: all of this had to be stopped.

Field had been waiting for the right case, and Santa Clara would be it.

It started in 1883 because back then Supreme Court judges also “rode the circuit,” working in their states as chief judges of the appeals courts most months of the year, and just spending a few months every year in Washington, DC, as justices of the Supreme Court.

So, in 1883, that case first came before Field in his capacity on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. He ruled in favor of the railroad, writing in his decision:

The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, in declaring that no State shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the “equal protection of the laws,” imposes a limitation upon the exercise of all the powers of the State which can touch the individual or his property, including that of taxation.

The “equal protection of the laws” to any one implies not only that the means for the security of his private rights shall be accessible to him on the same terms with others, but also that he shall be exempt from any greater burdens or charges than such as are equally imposed upon all others under like circumstances. This equal protection forbids unequal exactions of any kind, and among them that of unequal taxation.

Once Santa Clara County appealed their loss in the 9th Circuit, the case came before the US Supreme Court with Field himself as one of the men sitting in judgement.

The Oral Arguments

On January 26, 1886, the Supreme Court—with Justice Stephen J. Field in attendance—heard oral arguments in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. J.C. Bancroft Davis, the Court’s official reporter, took the notes, as did the county’s lawyer, Delphin Delmas.

The railroad’s lawyers made their pitch, echoing Field’s decision in the 9th Circuit case: “The Fourteenth Amendment protects ‘persons’ from unequal treatment. Corporations are persons. Therefore, California’s unequal tax assessment violates the railroad’s constitutional rights.”

The county’s lawyers countered: “The Fourteenth Amendment was written to protect freed slaves who are actual humans, not railroad corporations. The framers never intended to grant constitutional rights to corporate artificial entities created by state law.”

Then something weird happened.

Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite interrupted the arguments. According to court records, he made an announcement: “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.”

The county’s lawyer, trying to argue against the railroad’s assertion that they were “persons” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, was essentially told not to bother. The Court had already decided.

Or had it?

The Decision That Wasn’t

On May 10, 1886, the Supreme Court laid down its decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company.

Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote the majority opinion. It’s a technical, somewhat boring ruling about fence valuations and tax assessment procedures. The Court found in favor of the railroad, but not because of the Fourteenth Amendment; instead, it ruled that California had illegally included the value of the fences along the railroad right-of-way in the land’s assessment in violation of its own laws.

Here’s what Justice Harlan actually wrote in the Santa Clara opinion about corporate constitutional rights: nothing.

The Court’s decision explicitly avoided the constitutional question. The Court instead ruled on narrow technical grounds having to do with California tax law that had nothing whatsoever to do with whether corporations were persons under the Fourteenth Amendment.

In fact, Harlan’s decision begins by noting that since the Court could dispose of the case on other grounds, “it is not necessary to consider” whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to corporations.

It doesn’t get more explicit: “it is not necessary to consider.”

The Supreme Court explicitly refused to rule on corporate constitutional rights.

So where did the idea that Santa Clara established corporate constitutional rights come from?

The Headnote

J.C. Bancroft Davis was the Supreme Court’s Reporter of Decisions, what we today call the court reporter. His job was to take notes and then publish the Court’s written opinions in officially sanctioned volumes, adding brief headnotes to summarize each case.

For Santa Clara, Davis wrote: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

That sentence appears before the decision itself. It looks official. It’s printed in the United States Reports, the official record of Supreme Court decisions.

But it’s not part of the decision. It’s not law; it’s just Davis’s statement. And Davis’s statement directly contradicts what the decision actually says.

The decision itself said the Court was definitely not deciding the corporate constitutional rights question: it was “not necessary to consider” because they were only going to rule on whether the county illegally counted the value of fenceposts when calculating the value of the land for property taxes.

The headnote, on the other hand, explicitly says the Court decided that corporations are persons.

One of them was clearly and blatantly lying. And since the decision was the official ruling of the Supreme Court, written by Justice Harlan and agreed to by the other justices, the liar had to be Davis.

Davis, we now can see, put words in the Court’s mouth—words the Court never said, using language that would alter the course of American history for more than a century.

The question is why?

The Cover-Up Begins

Within months of the publication of the Santa Clara decision, lawyers for corporations began citing it as precedent for corporate constitutional rights, pointing to the headnote instead of the decision.

Judges, seeing that citation in the official United States Reports, assumed it was accurate and, within a decade, began to rely on it. Soon, other cases were citing Santa Clara as having finally and firmly established that corporations are persons under the Fourteenth Amendment and entitled to the rights previously enjoyed only by humans.

Nobody, it appears, bothered to check the actual decision. Why would they? After all, it was right there in the official record, summarized by the Supreme Court’s own official reporter, a wealthy and powerful man with a well-known reputation who was the son of the Massachusetts governor.

In 1889, just three years after Santa Clara, corporate lawyers first successfully established that damnable headnote as precedent. In Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway Co. v. Beckwith, the Supreme Court cited Santa Clara, claiming in an actual decision that corporations are persons under the Fourteenth Amendment.

With that case, now in an actual decision by the Court itself and not just a statement by the Court’s reporter, the lie became the law.

And today, much to the detriment of both democracy and America’s working class, 137 years later, it still is.

What Was Lost

The fraud of 1886 didn’t just corrupt constitutional law. It altered the entire course of American history.

The Progressive Era still happened, and the labor movement still won important victories. The income tax was established. Antitrust laws were passed. Women won the right to vote. The First Progressive Era, from the 1890s through 1920, identified crucial reforms, most of which just made America’s oligarchs even more determined to fight back.

And when the Republican Great Depression showed what unrestrained corporate power really meant—banks failing, families starving, millions homeless—Franklin Roosevelt reinvented American politics and economics to create the Second Progressive Era, what he called the New Deal. It included Social Security, the right to organize unions, regulations that prevented banks from gambling with depositors’ money, and a tax system that required the wealthy to pay their fair share.

By 1981 when Reagan was sworn into office, the American Dream was real for fully two-thirds of Americans. A single income could support a family. You could buy a house for three times your annual salary. College was affordable or, in some states, even free. Healthcare didn’t bankrupt families. Retirement was secure. Children had better opportunities than their parents.

But throughout that entire period, Field’s and Davis’s doctrine of corporate constitutional rights remained embedded in constitutional law like a dormant virus or an unexploded landmine. The oligarchs had lost battle after battle during the Progressive Eras, but they succeeded in hanging onto their ultimate weapon: the fraudulent claim that corporations had constitutional rights.

When Ronald Reagan’s “conservative (neoliberal oligarchic) revolution” began in 1981, that weapon was activated. Corporate constitutional rights became the battering ram that destroyed the American Dream, piece by piece, decade by decade, until we arrived at today, when Millennials own just 4.6 percent of the nation’s wealth compared to the 21.3 percent Boomers owned at the same age, and our president is openly dancing to the tunes of major polluters and fossil fuel corporations in exchange for campaign contributions and gifts.

The railroad oligarchs and their shills of 1886, J.C. Bancroft Davis and Stephen J. Field, planted a bomb in the Constitution. It took five generations to fully detonate it, but when the oligarchs of the 1970s and 1980s finally did, it laid waste to almost everything the Progressive Eras had built.

Understanding how that bomb was planted—and who planted it—is critical to knowing how to defuse it.

That’s what brings us to the triggerman: J.C. Bancroft Davis.

The Crime Scene

How Corporations Stole Human Rights in 1886

THE CASE

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company,
US Supreme Court, 1886

Actual issue: A county sued a railroad over $30,000 in unpaid property taxes.

THE CONSPIRATORS

THE TRIGGERMAN: J.C. Bancroft Davis, Supreme Court Reporter
Former railroad president • Railroad stock owner

His crime: Wrote a fraudulent summary claiming the Court ruled corporations are “persons”

THE MASTERMIND: Justice Stephen J. Field, Supreme Court Justice
Railroad stock owner • Friend of railroad oligarchs

His goal: Corporate constitutional rights through decades of failed court cases

THE FRAUD:

WHAT DAVIS WROTE: The Headnote: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment . . . ​”

THIS IS NOT LAW: Headnotes are summaries with no legal standing.

WHAT THE COURT ACTUALLY RULED: “It is not necessary to consider” whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to corporations.

THE COURT REFUSED TO DECIDE: They ruled only on a technicality about fence taxes.

THE RESULT: For 140 years, courts cited Davis’s fraudulent headnote as if it were law.

One lie became the foundation for

Citizens United: corporate “free speech” to buy elections

Hobby Lobby: corporate “religious freedom”

Corporate “privacy” to hide pollution and crimes

Corporate “due process” to block regulations

The Supreme Court never ruled that corporations are people.
A court reporter made it up.

Source: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 US 394 (1886)

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Prologue: A Crime in Plain Sight

Every law student in America learns the same story: “In 1886, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that corporations are persons under the Fourteenth Amendment. This single decision fundamentally transformed American democracy, business, and law. It granted corporations the same constitutional rights as human beings: free speech, due process, equal protection. Everything that followed, from unlimited corporate campaign spending to corporate control of our media, politics, and environment, traces back to that pivotal moment.”

There’s just one problem: It never happened. The Supreme Court debated this issue and never made that ruling. Not in 1886, not ever.

What actually happened is far more disturbing: A court reporter, a corrupt Supreme Court justice, and the railroad oligarchs who owned America’s most powerful corporations successfully conspired to rewrite the Constitution. They committed the crime in broad daylight, recorded it in official court documents, and hid it in plain sight for 140 years.

This is both a detective story and a true crime investigation. Like all good mysteries, it starts with a discovery, mine, in a dusty Vermont law library on a cold winter day in 2002.

The Library Discovery

I thought I was confirming a fact. Instead, I uncovered a crime scene.

I was researching corporate power in America, working in the Vermont Supreme Court library six blocks from my then-home in Montpelier. Every legal textbook, every encyclopedia, every Supreme Court case for the past hundred-plus years cited the same precedent: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886) established that corporations are persons under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The reason I was in the library was simple: I wanted to read the actual decision, not summaries, not commentary, but the words the Supreme Court actually wrote.

The Vermont Supreme Court library contains one of the most comprehensive collections of legal documents in New England. Librarian Paul Donovan pulled down Volume 118 of United States Reports: Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court at October Term 1885 and October Term 1886. The book was published in 1888 by Banks & Brothers in New York, written by J.C. Bancroft Davis, the Supreme Court’s official reporter.

The volume was heavy in my hands, its leather binding cracked with age, pages giving off that distinctive smell of vanilla and dust that old books possess, the scent of history itself.

I found the case—page 394. What I discovered there would change everything I thought I knew about American democracy.

The decision itself, the actual legal ruling written by Justice Harlan, said nothing about corporate constitutional rights. In fact, it explicitly stated that the Court was not deciding that constitutional question. The Court instead ruled on a narrow technical issue about fence-post assessments and California property tax law. Corporate constitutional rights under the Fourteenth Amendment were not addressed, not decided, and not even meaningfully mentioned.

But at the top of the case, before the decision itself, sat something called a “headnote” which said, in part: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

I read it again. Then again. My coffee grew cold on the table beside me.

The headnote claimed that under the Constitution corporations were persons.

The decision explicitly refused to rule on that question.

One of them was lying.

I paid seventy cents for photocopies and walked through the crisp winter air to the office of Jim Ritvo, a local attorney and friend.

“What’s a headnote?” I asked, spreading the pages on his desk.

He leaned back in his chair, studying the documents. “Court reporters write them. They’re summaries for lawyers, convenient shortcuts to understand what a case is about without reading the whole thing.” He looked up at me. “But Thom, headnotes aren’t law. They’re not part of the decision. They have no legal standing whatsoever.”

“So, this headnote that says corporations are persons . . . ​”

“Isn’t law,” he finished. “Never was.”

I felt the floor shift beneath me.

“But every case since 1886 cites this as precedent! Law schools teach it. The Supreme Court itself cited it more than a dozen times.”

Jim picked up the pages, reading more carefully. “Then somebody’s been fooled for a very long time. Or somebody’s been doing the fooling.”

The American Dream Is Murdered

I didn’t know it yet, standing in that Vermont library, but I was about to discover why my generation was the last to experience the American Dream as our parents and grandparents knew it.

When my Boomer generation was the same average age as Millennials are today, back in 1990, we held 21.3 percent of the nation’s wealth. Louise and I shared in that wealth: although we were still in our 30s, in 1990 we owned a profitable small business—our fourth—and a nice home.

Our own locally owned business, a home of our own, and the knowledge that our kids would have more opportunities than we did: that was, in fact, one common way of defining the American Dream. It was normal then.

My dad, born in 1928, worked in a tool and die shop. He was able to buy a house, a new car every two years, and take a two-week vacation every year because the middle class in America before the Reagan Revolution had a pretty damn good life. Dad retired in the 1990s with a full pension that let him and my mom travel the world. He lived the American Dream, as did his four boys.

Millennials today, by contrast, are roughly the same number of people as Boomers were in 1990 but hold only 4.6 percent of the nation’s wealth. If they’re the same age I was in 1990, they’re most likely struggling to own a home, are deeply in debt, and find it nearly impossible to start a small business.

This is what a bizarre theory called “corporate personhood” or “corporate constitutional rights” has brought us to. Boomers in their 30s owned 21.3 percent of the nation’s wealth, while Millennials in their 30s today own a mere 4.6 percent of the nation’s wealth.

And the story for Zoomers, those born in the late 1990s and early 2000s, is pretty much the same, if not slightly worse.

What happened?

The answer was there on page 394 of that musty law book. A single fraudulent sentence that gave America’s oligarchs and the corporations that made them rich the constitutional weapons to dismantle everything that made America work for working people.

Why did my children’s generation face stagnant wages while across the nation worker productivity soared? Why did crushing student debt replace the free or near-free college my generation enjoyed? Why did housing costs explode from two times annual income to ten times annual income? Why did healthcare go from a manageable expense to the leading cause of bankruptcy in America? Why did the promise that hard work would be rewarded with security become a cruel joke for tens of millions of Americans?

Virtually all of it came about because of corporate constitutional rights.

That fraudulent headnote gave corporations constitutional rights they could wield against democratic governance. Against unions. Against environmental protections. Against consumer safety laws. Against taxes that funded public goods. Against anything and everything that built and sustained the American middle class.

The American Dream didn’t just fade away: it was murdered. And the murder weapon was forged in 1886 and then lifted against all of us with the 1980s Reagan Revolution.

The Investigation Begins

I spent the next few weeks in that library, pulling case after case. The pattern was unmistakable. Dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of court decisions cited Santa Clara as establishing corporate constitutional rights. They cited it the same way, always referencing that headnote but never quoting the decision itself that contradicted it.

The legal profession had been fooled. Or perhaps more accurately, it had fooled itself, generation after generation of lawyers and judges accepting what they’d been taught without checking the original source.

But who wrote that headnote? And why? Is this what they intended? And what does it mean not just for working-class people but for our democracy itself?

The answer to those questions would lead me deep into one of the most consequential conspiracies in American history, a conspiracy involving railroad oligarchs who controlled more wealth than entire nations, a Supreme Court justice whose corruption was hiding in plain sight, and a court reporter whose single fraudulent sentence would reshape American democracy for more than a century.

This book tells that story. But it tells more than that.

It reveals how that original crime in 1886 metastasized into today’s corporate domination of our economy, our media, our politics, and our lives. How the oligarchs of this era—the billionaires who control corporations like Exxon-Mobil, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Google, and Comcast—are the direct heirs to those railroad barons. How they’ve used the same legal fiction to accumulate unprecedented power and transfer over fifty trillion dollars from working Americans to their own money bins just over the past four decades.

It shows how two Progressive Eras, from the 1890s through 1921 and again from 1933 through 1981, built the American Dream by constraining corporate power. How the Founders understood the dangers of corporate tyranny and deliberately excluded corporations from constitutional protection. How FDR’s recognition that “necessitous men are not free men” led to the creation of the largest middle class in world history, with two-thirds of Americans achieving middle-class status by the day Reagan was sworn in as president on January 20, 1981.

And it shows how corporate constitutional rights gave America’s oligarchs, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, the weapons they needed to tear it all down. To crush unions. To slash taxes on the wealthy. To offshore our factories. To turn healthcare into a profit center. To transform housing into a speculative commodity. To burden our children with crushing debt for the education that was once free or nearly free.

All to make themselves richer than any king, emperor, or pharaoh in all of human history.

The Cover-Up and the Solutions

But stealing our constitutional rights wasn’t enough; to get away with the crime, the perpetrators needed to hide it. They needed to make sure that when working Americans asked, “Who killed the American Dream?” they’d blame the wrong people.

Thus, they began a cover-up of the crime, in part, as an effort to slip it into subsequent Supreme Court decisions to make it law and, in part, as an effort to disguise the crime itself from current and future generations.

Over the past fifty or so years, the most effective part of the deflection—or cover-up playbook—has been a remarkably successful effort to divert Americans’ attention and anger away from the oligarchs and corporations that are actively undermining our democracy and get people to instead blame their woes on women, people of color, welfare recipients, and, most recently, nonwhite immigrants.

Entire media operations have joined this effort, as I’ll document in subsequent chapters. And it’s been largely successful; most Americans—and certainly the Republican base—have bought the cover-up hook, line, and sinker. They have no idea that the same billionaires who own the media that keeps them fooled are also working hard to keep them down, and instead cheer every effort to “own the libs” rather than constraining corporate or billionaire power.

What You Can Do to Fight Back

Most importantly, this book shows how we can undo the crime. How we can restore democracy. How we can reclaim the rights that were stolen from us and given to artificial entities that exist only on paper. I’ll detail for you exactly how we can rebuild the American Dream for our children and grandchildren.

There are multiple steps to reversing the abuse of human rights that this crime, committed in 1886, handed to corporations and America’s oligarchs.

They include passing legislation to blunt some of the worst impacts (particularly on our politics, now that corporations and billionaires can legally buy elections), passing a constitutional amendment to prevent Republicans on the Supreme Court from continuing or expanding these “corporate constitutional rights,” and waking up as many Americans as possible to this crime and its consequences.

We can fight back at every level of government (and you’ll learn that people have been doing just this for decades with increasing success). Taking on this battle can be one of the most effective ways of re--empowering our democracy.

The rebellion has already begun; by the time you finish this book, you’ll know how to join it.

But first, we need to understand exactly how the crime was committed.

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Obama rescues neoliberalism from itself

The following year Barack Obama was elected to the presidency. In his inaugural address he told the American people that markets needed supervision to work.

“Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill,” President Obama said, looking into the camera. “Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched. But this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control. The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.”

Americans who were hopeful that the age of neoliberalism was coming to an end (even if they didn’t know there was a name for it) cheered: Obama’s popularity soared above 60 percent.

Instead of ending neoliberalism, though, Obama expanded it dramatically with the Affordable Care Act, putting the nation’s healthcare needs in the hands of billion-dollar insurance companies and extending the privatization of Medicare through the Medicare Advantage scam that George W. Bush had brought to being.

He refused to regulate the nation’s monopolies, instead extending George W. Bush’s Emergency Economic Stabilization Act and the Troubled Asset Relief Program that poured ever-more money into the pockets of Wall Street banksters.

Advised by notorious neoliberal Larry Summers (formerly Clinton’s Treasury Secretary) and former Wall Street banker Timothy Geitner (as Obama’s Treasury Secretary), Obama passed on the opportunity to re-regulate the banks or push for legislation like a revisited Glass-Steagal to prevent checkbook banks from gambling in the stock market with your and my deposits. Instead, he went with the watered-down Dodd-Frank legislation championed by two noted neoliberal legislators who were both deeply in the pockets of Wall Street banks.[cxiii]

Bankers are still running many of their old scams even as I write these words in 2022.

Meanwhile, President Obama oversaw without objection the explosion of the neoliberal dream of a so-called “gig economy” where companies relabeled their employees as “independent contractors” to avoid insurance, taxes and the regulations and liabilities that come as an employer.

Even his smallest pushbacks against neoliberalism – including an attempt to raise income taxes on the morbidly rich and advance universal pre-K – were shot down by Republicans and neoconservative Democrats in Congress.

Dissatisfied, Americans decided to try the Republicans again.

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George W Bush Pushes Neoliberalism even farther

By the time George W. Bush became president in January 2001 neoliberalism had defeated even the Perot faction of American thought: politicians who opposed it, like Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown on the left and Mike Lee and Ron Paul on the right, were dismissed as cranks and outliers trying to stand in the way of progress.

Bush continued the process, with his largest success being the privatization, with the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, of a large chunk of the nation’s premiere government-funded healthcare program, Medicare.

The new “Medicare Advantage” programs, entirely run by private entities, cost the federal government on average 11% more than Medicare and were given the freedom to deny services to their customers the way health insurance companies have been scamming their customers for generations.[xcv]

I lay this out chapter-and-verse in The Hidden History of American Healthcare, but suffice it to say that by this writing nearly half of the entire Medicare program has now been replace by fully privatized health insurance under the deceptive rubric of “Medicare Advantage” while Medicare itself has been seriously defunded by the transfer of so many billions to the bottom lines of “Advantage” providers.

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Bush also used the excuse of the deregulation of the banking industry in 1999 to look the other way as his morbidly rich donors in the financial services industry created hundreds of exotic new “products” to sell to investors, the most notorious being Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) used to bundle fraudulent home mortgages in with good ones to disguise their provenance and risks.

Bankers like California’s notorious “Foreclosure King” Stephen Mnuchin became fabulously rich, picking up a private jet and multimillion-dollar mansion while the nation’s economy inched further and further out onto thin ice. [xcvi]

Through it all, despite a few warning voices, the Bush administration and the neoliberal-leaning governments of Europe’s largest nations all reassured us that the market operated on its own “magic invisible hand” rules and there was nothing to worry about. Just trust the market and the market-makers. They know what they’re doing.

And, indeed, they did know what they were doing. Just like John Dillinger and Ken Lay did. They extracted literally trillions of dollars out of the US and other western economies and then stood back, feigning helplessness, when it all collapsed in the “Bush Crash” of 2008.

In response to the crisis bankers created, governments around the world shoveled money at those very same bankers and their institutions.

“The total potential federal government support could reach up to $23.7 trillion,” is what Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), reported to Congress in 2008.[xcvii]

While the actual American part of the banker bailout was probably closer to $5 trillion, by 2010 the bankers were giving each other billion-dollar bonuses and diving off the high boards into their money bins.

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It’s almost as if Milton Friedman had planned it; after all, his first step out of academia and into paid shilling for industry and the ultra-rich was to author that notorious 1946 pamphlet for the real estate industry advocating total deregulation of both the real estate business and the banks that offered mortgages.

Bush’s other big neoliberal experiment was with the government of Iraq. His brother Jeb Bush, along with his Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his Vice President Dick Cheney, and his advisors Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, and John Bolton had all signed onto the notorious 1998 Project for a New American Century statement calling on then-President Bill Clinton to immediately invade Iraq and expel Saddam Hussein.[xcviii]

As Cheney would later note, Iraq was sitting atop the second-largest single-country reserve of oil in the world, just behind Saudi Arabia. “He sits on top of 10 per cent of the world’s oil reserves,” Cheney said, adding, “He has enormous wealth being generated by that.”[xcix]

While former Haliburton oil company chief Cheney was salivating over the prospect of seizing and selling all that oil, George W. Bush saw a war in Iraq as a way to guarantee his own re-election in 2004.

Back in 1999, writer Mickey Herskowitz, hired by the Bush family to ghost-write Bush’s autobiography A Charge To Keep,[c] explained that Bush told him:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”[ci]

Bush wasn’t much of an ideologue and its unlikely he could have even explained neoliberalism, but his Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was both a student and close personal friend of Milton Friedman and an ardent neoliberal.

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Once Iraq was conquered and Hussein was dead, Rumsfeld put former Kissinger and Associates managing director L. Paul Bremmer III in charge of the country. Bremmer, the wealthy son of the former CEO of Christian Dior, had been educated in the world’s best private schools from Phillips Andover Academy to Yale University to the Paris Institute of Political Studies. He knew the rich and powerful of the world – he was one of them – and had been Rumsfeld’s assistant in the first Bush administration overseeing the first Gulf War against Saddam.

Bremmer followed the Mont Pelerin neoliberal script to the last detail. The Iraqi army was the nation’s largest employer, with over a half-million men drawing a weekly paycheck and each having an AK-47 handy in their homes. Bremmer fired them all, creating an instant and well-armed insurgency of pissed-off formerly middle-class soldiers.

He also shut down almost all of the hundreds of government-owned companies, from those manufacturing steel to machine tools to cement and military goods.

He threw open the country to the world’s predatory corporations, eliminating all tariffs and trade regulations, while standing aside as the nation’s government-run libraries and museums were looted on behalf of wealthy foreign antiquities collectors. All of this was a clear violation of international law that prevents winners in wars from looting the countries they’ve conquered, but neoliberals around the world had always ignored such laws.

Rumsfeld defended the video of looters carrying off 3000-year-old irreplaceable artifacts with the glib, “Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.” When asked if looting was the inevitable consequence of Rumsfeld’s “freedom,” he replied, as CNN reported, “Stuff happens.”[cii]

Bremmer then threw out Iraq’s progressive corporate and individual income taxes that peaked at 45% and replaced them with Milton Friedman’s beloved 15% flat-tax, a huge windfall to Iraq’s wealthy elite but a massive and sudden tax increase for the country’s low-income workers.

He ended Iraq’s laws requiring domestic ownership of major industries, allowing foreigners to buy and own 100% of pretty much anything – from land to oil to businesses – and take up to 100% of their profits out of the country tax-free.[ciii]

After neoliberalism had failed spectacularly in Chile, gutted the American and British middle classes, and had flipped Russia from a brief democracy into a brutal oligarchy, Iraq was to be the final proof that it could work.

Wolfowitz, Bremmer, and neoliberal apologists around the world promised the country would soon flower, as the “free market” lacking government regulation and with minimal taxation would solve all problems from poverty to political corruption to meeting the people’s basic food, housing and safety needs.

It didn’t work out that way.

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Instead of a million flowers blossoming in the soil of neoliberal “freedom,” over three million Iraqis lost their homes and became internal refugees,[civ] nearly a half-million fled the country (those with the wealth to get out), and 288,000 died as a direct consequence of the American invasion.[cv]

And that doesn’t begin to account for generations of trauma and PTSD, destroyed infrastructure and torn-apart families, and the shattering of America’s image and influence around the world.

Twenty years later and the neoliberal project largely abandoned and never mentioned out loud by its champions, Iraq is still staggering, plagued by political instability, disease, and an Iraqi warlord version of the oligarchic political culture neoliberalism always produces.

Neoliberalism blows up in Bush’s face

Meanwhile, back here in America, neoliberal policies brought our government and economic system to its knees in the last year of Bush’s presidency. Banks, investment houses and real estate speculators had been deregulated nine years earlier and used their new “freedom” to essentially rob, rape, and pillage the American financial landscape.

In the process, corrupt financial operations and betting on stocks became a huge part of the American economy.

The greatest damage to America came because loaning, borrowing, and trading money and securities produces absolutely nothing of lasting value to a country. It’s not at all like manufacturing, where applying labor to raw materials produces products that have lasting value.

Instead, unregulated finance extracts massive amounts of cash as commissions and fees for a small number of fabulously wealthy and powerful Wall Street giants, actually reducing resources that could instead be used to manufacture things that do add value for generations.

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But don’t just take my word for it. Jack Bogle was the guy who created the first widely-traded index fund, the Vanguard 500, back in 1976. Although he stepped down as chairman of the company in 1999, he still opines about the state of the economy and, in a moment of extraordinary candor, told reporters for Money magazine in 2015:

“The job of finance is to provide capital to companies. We do it to the tune of $250 billion a year in IPOs and secondary offerings. What else do we do? We encourage investors to trade about $32 trillion a year. So the way I calculate it, 99% of what we do in this industry is people trading with one another, with a gain only to the middleman. It’s a waste of resources.”[cvi]

In 2008 the bill came due for the trillions of dollars speculators, hedge funds, mortgage bankers and other predators in the financial services industry had extracted from the American and world economies.

It started in 2000, after the 1999 neoliberal deregulation of America’s banks: bankers went on a lending spree to would-be homeowners, offering them mortgages with no income or asset requirements (sometimes called “Liar Loans”).

Because this practice was injecting so much new money into the housing market, housing prices were soaring; many of the no-asset home purchasers were average people trying to be real estate speculators, figuring they’d buy a house, hold it for a year or two, and sell it for a solid profit.

“Home Flipping” became a thing.

All across America telephone poles had flyers on them for “real estate seminars” promising to teach average folks how to make money in the housing market just like the billionaire bankers did. It was a national celebration of get-rich-quick grifting.

One of the larger grifts in this marketplace, for example, was Trump University. As the Washington Post noted, Trump’s sales pitch was, “[T]he billionaire had made enough money for himself. Now, he would put his famous brain to work for the little guy.”[cvii]

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The Liar Loans not only let millions of people speculate in the real estate market but also gave an entrée into single-family housing for millions of people whose income and assets would have prevented them from borrowing in a regulated market. As long as the economy was good, though, and they had a reliable income, they could hang on to their first homes.

The banks and mortgage houses took those Liar Loan mortgages, mixed them with “good” assets like mortgages to people with the means to repay their loans, and sold these interest-bearing “products” in the open investment market.

They bribed the credit rating agencies to give them a seal of approval, and banks themselves bought and sold trillions in these “Collateralized Debt Obligations” or CDOs and other exotic “products.”[cviii]

Because they were generally high-interest loans (because of the borrowers’ poor credit ratings), they paid far more than most all other readily available investments. Throughout the first 8 years of the 21^st century they spread into investment portfolios all over the world.

Then came the recession of 2006. The market softened, unemployment went up, and millions were facing foreclosure. Most hung on, driving up credit card or other debt to keep their houses, hoping prices would rise back up enough that they could sell them for what they owed.

That wasn’t to happen.

By 2008, the housing market was completely in the tank and foreclosures had reached the point where the owners of CDOs and other “innovative” investment instruments created out of the 1999 deregulation could no longer ignore the risk of defaults.

January 2008 saw a 57 percent increase in foreclosures over the previous year, and February dropped another 24 percent year-over-year. Resale home prices fell 4.6 percent in January and were down 8.2 percent by the end of February. The system was hemorrhaging cash. [cix]

The biggest problem big investors in CDO’s and other debt instruments had was that, because the market was deregulated and supposedly run by the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, nobody knew exactly how many bad mortgages were buried in these bundles or what kind of a liability they represented as a share of the US’s $12 trillion mortgage market.[cx] Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae alone had taken on $3 trillion in loans all by themselves: the big banks were opaque and, if they knew how much poison they’d packaged, they weren’t telling anybody.[cxi]

Money market funds were heavily invested in these new “products” and tried to unload them as fast as they could…but nobody was buying. Seeing that the funds, which are not federally guaranteed, could fail, investors pulled out cash like there was no tomorrow.

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On September 16^th, the Reserve Primary Fund “broke the buck,” meaning they paid back dollars given them with less than a dollar each. The next day investors pulled a record $172 billion from money market funds, adding to the pressure (normal withdrawals are around $7 billion/day).[cxii]

By the time of the 2008 election, Congress had poured $700 billion into bailing out bankers and the Fed had anted up almost three trillion dollars, between their $1.7 trillion “commercial loan program,” their $540 billion loan to money markets, and their June “Term Auction Facility” loan of $225 billion. The FDIC threw an additional $1.3 trillion into the banking system on November 21^st.

Wall Street bankers (except for Lehman Brothers, the only bank “allowed to fail”) were sighing a huge sigh of relief and hurrying to stash their billions of ill-gotten gains in tax havens overseas.

At the same time, homeowners across America were being thrown out of their houses in a national tsunami of foreclosures that lead an early explosion in homelessness.

Bankster Steve Mnuchin alone would pick up one of the California banks holding some of this debt and throw 36,000 people out of their homes, each foreclosure earning his company a federal bailout payment and earning him the moniker “The Foreclosure King.” This positioned him perfectly for a later job with Donald Trump as the nation’s Treasury Secretary. His profitable, no-risk strategy was being replicated by banks and mortgage brokers all across the nation.

As fully 10 million Americans lost their homes, Americans began to openly question neoliberalism. On my radio program at the time, I openly speculated that 2008 would go down in history as “the year neoliberalism died in America.”

Sadly, I was premature in that proclamation.

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.